The Rising of Bella Casey Read online

  He moved uncertainly towards her and she realised the reason for his surliness. His breath oozed porter. She was ashamed for him. To be footless at this hour! She tried to calculate where Mother might be for she mustn’t see him in such a state.

  ‘You’ve been carrying on behind my back,’ he said, ‘and that’s the reason you’re tricked up like this.’

  ‘No, Nick, no,’ she said. She was bewildered by the turn of the conversation, the strange reversal in their disputation. Wasn’t he the errant husband returning home in a drunken state?

  ‘I spotted you,’ he said and lurched forward jabbing his finger in the air. ‘As I was coming out of Bergin’s. I seen you with yer man in broad daylight chatting away like there was no tomorrow, dawdling and making eyes at him.’

  ‘That was the Reverend Leeper that you saw, you know, from the school at St Mary’s. There’s nothing sinister afoot …’

  She coloured when she said that and Nick pounced on her discomfiture for it seemed the porter hadn’t dimmed his senses entirely.

  ‘So why the pretty blush on your cheeks, my dear?’ This soft voice of his frightened her much more than the barking that had preceded it. ‘Like a woman with something to hide.’

  He’d hit upon the truth even in his ignorance.

  ‘It isn’t that at all, Nick.’ She tried a soothing tone, the kind she used when Susan was throwing one of her tantrums. ‘Sure, isn’t he a man of the cloth, and married with it?’

  ‘Did you let him have you in some doorway? Is that what kept you?’

  ‘Nick!’

  ‘You hear me, Bella Beaver, and hear me good,’ he bellowed, grabbing her by the forearms and shaking her, his face twisted in rage. ‘Don’t you think you can play me for a jackass!’

  He unmanacled her arms and took a step backwards. She smoothed her sleeves and the creased collar of her blouse.

  ‘All tarted up and swanning about as soon as my back is turned like some pattern wife …’

  ‘Oh Nick, it’s for you I’m all dressed up.’

  He snorted. She decided to tell him about the baby there and then; that would surely sweeten his temper.

  ‘I’m expecting, Nick,’ she said. Once again, it was not how she’d planned it. Would the circumstances between them ever be just right?

  ‘She’s expecting,’ he repeated stonily. ‘And how can I be sure it’s mine?’

  The past seemed to rear up between them as if Nick were only catching up to it. It was as if for a moment the world had tipped, like a capsizing ship, and the familiar had become contrary. The next thing, out of nowhere, he struck her, landing a blow on her cheekbone so sudden and so hard that she didn’t quite know what had hit her. Down she went. Then quite calmly, Nick stepped over her and stormed off, nearly taking the hinges of the street door with him.

  He did not return until close to midnight. Bella had taken Susan into bed with her for she had taken an age to settle after the earlier commotion. She was glad of the child’s distress if only to give her a chance to escape into the silent darkness of the back room and be alone rather than having to suffer Mother’s withering looks. Had the neighbours heard their dispute, she wondered. How could they not have with Nick bellowing at the top of his lungs and their business being aired to all and sundry? Susan settled eventually but Bella lay where she was, fully clothed for fear of disturbing her. She hadn’t the energy to disrobe. She was numb, but it was with a surfeit of feeling, not a want of it. Her biggest fear was that Nick would not return at all. How would she manage then with a baby on the way and no money coming in? To what new depths would she have to sink? An hour passed, then another, then three. She was still involved in her petrified calculations when the door of the room opened and Nick’s silent figure entered. She felt his weight sink down on the bed beside her. Susan whimpered and stirred. He sat bowed in the dark with his back to her. She wanted to stretch out her hand and touch him but she was afraid of what fresh fury it might excite so she lay there utterly still, curled around Susan and played dead. A few moments earlier, the prospect of his return seemed inconceivable; now he was here, she didn’t know how to act. Is this how it would be from now on, an icy calm between them? Would that be so bad? Wouldn’t it be superior to raised fists? Better surely than disgrace and destitution. It had never occurred to her that the married state would be so full of negotiation.

  ‘Bel,’ he whispered coarsely, ‘are you awake?’

  She knew then that his rage was all spent. She reached out to him. Her fingers met the crested wing of his shoulder blade and suddenly he seemed to crumple. The broad expanse of his back shuddered and he collapsed into weeping, choking sobs and loud snuffles when he couldn’t find a handkerchief to stem the flow.

  ‘Don’t know what came over me.’ He spoke into the darkness, still with his back turned. ‘Must be those damn jabs the medic’s been giving me. I’m all out of sorts.’

  There were always fevers running through the barrack rooms with all those men at close quarters. But she didn’t ask what he meant for fear any interrogation might be taken as quarrelsome and the truce would be destroyed. She let it pass, trading knowledge for the sake of peace.

  She had a rainbow face for days. She did her best to cover her coloured eye with powder, but even if others couldn’t see it, she knew it was there. Normally she would not have ventured out looking like that, but Susan wanted to wave her daddy off at Custom House Quay, and with all the commotion that the child had witnessed, Bella wanted to appease her. It was a stiff kind of farewell. The events of the night before had chastened them. There had been no making up, just a chilly estrangement tinged with shame. For once, Bella was relieved to see him go. When he had embarked, she turned away where once she would have waited to see the ship disappear into the clouded distance. But all she wanted was the safe harbour of home. She hurried away, Susan in tow, with her eyes cast downward so as not to draw attention to herself. So intent was she on invisibility, that at the corner of D’Olier Street, she crashed into a woman with a plumed hat. In the collision, Susan lost her footing and fell. She shrieked, her face creased in protest at the fall.

  ‘Oh dear, is the little girl alright?’ the woman in the hat asked.

  Bella was stooped over Susan, trying to find out where it hurt. But the voice made her look up. It was Lily Clesham.

  ‘Bella Casey!’ Lily cried.

  She moved into action, sweeping Susan up in her arms, the feather of her hat grazing Bella’s bruised face. She pressed her lips against the child’s scraped knee.

  ‘And what’s your name, little girl?’ she cooed at Susan who was so surprised by this lavish show of affection that she stopped whimpering. ‘Is she yours, Bella?’

  Bella nodded, surveying Lily’s finery, her dapper velvet jacket, her peacock hat.

  ‘Oh look how bad I’ve been about keeping in touch!’ she lamented. ‘You are married and with child!’

  Susan began to fret and make strange so Lily reluctantly handed her back.

  ‘Oh, have I upset the poor mite?’ she said. ‘Forgive me. And I’m forgetting my manners. Let me introduce my fiancé.’

  The man who had stood quietly by her side stepped forward.

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘is Mr McNeice. And this, Fred, is my dear friend, Bella …’

  ‘Beaver,’ Bella supplied. ‘Mrs Bella Beaver.’

  ‘Pleased, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Lily often mentions you.’

  An indulgent look passed between him and Lily. They might have been stepping out for several years, but their fondness seemed newly-minted. He wore a three-piece suit, with a paisley waistcoat, and he had a most elegant bearing. Not as manly as her Nick, Bella thought, but manliness had its drawbacks as she had discovered.

  ‘We’re going to have our photograph taken at Lauder Brothers, which is why we’re all dolled up. I hope you don’t think this is how I generally go about,’ Lily said. ‘I’m teaching in Galway as I had planned and John is hoping to enroll in Trinity College. H
e will have to have a degree before the church will take him. In the meantime, he’s teaching school in Dr Benson’s in Rathmines.’

  She stopped to draw breath. Lily has got both a teacher and a clergyman, Bella thought sourly.

  ‘And your husband, Bella?’

  ‘My Nicholas is in the army. He’s stationed in Aldershot at present.’

  ‘That must be hard on you,’ she said and she looked squarely at Bella. Despite her disguise, Bella felt Lily could see the blossoming bruise on her cheek and beyond it to the shame in her heart.

  ‘Fred and I must make do with one weekend in four but he does not have to cross the sea to visit,’ she went on. ‘And for the little one, without a father.’

  She has a father, Bella wanted to shout, but she checked herself. This was Lily, dear Lily, who meant only well.

  ‘Dear Bella,’ she sighed, and it was as if her name stood in for all that was unspoken between them. ‘We absolutely must correspond.’

  She took a little notebook from her purse and insisted on taking Bella’s address. They exchanged a few more pleasantries, but it was awkward, and Bella was glad when Susan set up a whimpering and she could use it as an excuse to move on. As she made for home, she could not help compare their circumstances. Lily with her schoolmaster beau soon to be a minister of the church, while all she had to show, she thought savagely, was the shameful badge of a conjugal furlough.

  A fortnight later a large brown box was delivered to Hawthorn Terrace. When Bella opened it, it was a gift from Lily, a pair of candlesticks – real silver, not plate – with an ivy branch embossed on their columns. They must have cost a small fortune. There was a card inside. ‘To dearest Bella,’ Lily had written, ‘let us not be strangers.’ But Bella realised they already were.

  WORTHY OF INSPECTION

  In time Bella’s ambitions would turn to rising above Rutland Place. It was not the house, but the neighbours she objected to. Many of them were Romanists and she was anxious to emphasise the distinction between them. She never left the front door open, as was their habit, for through such an aperture the malevolence of tittle-tattle would march in and travel out. She would not halt on the pavement trading small talk though sometimes it was unavoidable.

  ‘A fine-looking man, your husband,’ Mrs Gildea said to her one day having ambushed her on the street. She lived three doors up and was given to being more familiar with Bella than their association warranted.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid to let him out of your sight? I seen him at the station and honest to God, Mrs Beaver, he’s the smartest-looking porter I ever clapped eyes on.’

  ‘He’s a parcels clerk, actually,’ Bella said for Nick had worked his way up.

  ‘And no surprise,’ she replied. ‘Tricked out like that, he could be taken for the stationmaster himself. Turned heads, I can tell you.’

  Bella often wondered how other women might look on Nick. She knew he was not above a flirtatious glance if a well-turned heel passed him on the street, but was that not true of all men? But then, what did she know of all men?

  Joan Gildea knew what kind of man Nicholas Beaver was. She’d seen him in the North Star Hotel, a glimpse, mind you, through the brown portal of the snug, his arm thrown around a girl half his age in a purple costume with a fur stole thrown over it, its tails dripping and the two eyes of the fox looking straight at her.

  ‘All the same,’ Mrs Gildea went on, coming over all womanly. ‘Sure it doesn’t matter where they gets their appetites once they ate at home.’

  It was just such coarseness Bella wanted to shut out.

  But Nick made no such distinctions. Pretty soon every man on the street had tramped through their parlour and scullery and out into the back yard – as much of it as was free – to view his birds. He had built a pigeon coop and populated it fully. The pigeons were ugly creatures with their dull grey coats and scaly claws. No better than vermin, Bella thought, and they were distinctly unclean. Even their brightly-coloured fantails couldn’t save them from being common, like street judies wearing powder to hide evidence of the French Disease.

  ‘Ah Bel, you don’t understand,’ Nick would say as he stood in the yard with one of them clutched on his wrist, another perched on his head. The rest clustered about him making a cooing racket while he fed them from his palm.

  ‘Here,’ he would say, wanting her to pet one.

  But she hated the feel of those feathers and the throbbing pulse of their crops. She did not want them lodged in her back yard, housed in their rotten barracks one on top of another, breeding fiercely and carrying infection. But there was no gainsaying Nick’s affection for them. He was quite motherly with them. She would peer out the scullery window when he was feeding them. He knew each of them by sight and spoke to them in endearments more suited to the bed-chamber. If Tommy Owens or Needle Nugent was out there with him, their talk was so hushed and admiring, it was as if a string of chorus girls were out in the yard, not a coven of slate-coloured birds.

  ‘Clean as a barracks on inspection day,’ Nick would say about the lofts. He was fastidious in his care of the birds’ quarters. But she saw only evidence of their dirty ways, leaving their calling cards on her newly-cleaned windows and her sheets hanging out to dry. When Nick had first taken to racing homers, Bella was delighted to see him disappear off out of the house with a basket of the creatures, all fidgety and fretting at their sudden transport. Hours later he would return home with the empty wicker and stand out in the yard anxiously eyeing the skies. Sometimes she prayed that they might get lost or become so intoxicated with their freedom that they might fail to return; if she were a pigeon, it is what she would have chosen. But by dusk the sky would be sooty with wings as they made their jubilant homecoming.

  Nick would often ramble down to the Bird Market on Bride Street to buy another of what he called his feathered friends. Once, Bella remembered, he came home from the market with a goldfinch in a tiny lantern cage.

  ‘Come the good weather,’ he said ‘we’ll hang it outside the front door and won’t it brighten up the street?’

  We will in our eye, Bella thought to herself. She did not hold with any class of boastful decoration on the house, but she said nothing for she had learned that sometimes it was wiser to yield in small contretemps. She was just relieved that it was not another beller or a bard, a red mealie or a white-tip, or a fresh pair of tumblers for they were already over-run with those. She knew the names of all the blessed pigeons. It was impossible for her not to pick up knowledge, even if it was knowledge she didn’t care to have. Mostly, though, she pretended ignorance for she did not want to be drawn into the care of the detestable creatures.

  ‘Look, Bel,’ Nick breathed, ‘look at her plumage, the wing feathers tipped with gold.’ He caressed the splash of crimson on the goldfinch’s crown. ‘Isn’t she a pure beauty?’

  She was always impressed by the elegance with which Nick spoke about the birds and how soft he was about them, like a woman in love.

  ‘Isn’t it a shame to keep her under lock and key?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah Bel, see, your finch becomes quite docile in captivity.’

  Unlike the cursed pigeons with their throaty racket, she thought.

  ‘Isn’t that right, my little beauty?’ Nick said and folded the bird to his chest, pressing his lips to its crown.

  The next morning Nick went out to check on the bird. Bella heard the creak of the cage door, followed by an oath.

  ‘A pox on him!’

  When Nick was riled, he spoke plain soldier. Bella rushed out into the backyard where a dun-coloured impostor sat on the perch. Mixed in with the grain on the floor of the cage was a carpet of gold and crimson glinting cruelly in the morning light. That was all that remained of the magnificent uniform of the day before.

  ‘That blackguard sold me a spadger and painted it up to look like a brassy hoor.’ Nick paced up and down the yard. ‘I’ve been done.’

  In that moment, she saw how it would be if Nick knew ho
w else he’d been deceived.

  ‘If I ever clap eyes on the poltroon who did this, I’ll wring his bloody neck for him.’

  He reached into the cage and catching the trembling bird he throttled it to death with his bare hand. Bella watched, open-mouthed, as he flung the abject creature into the gutter. The memory of the day Nick had struck her in Mother’s house came back to her. The same shock and disbelief, even though this time the sudden inflammation of his temper had been directed not at her, but at a helpless bird.

  ‘What are you gaping at?’ he barked at her.

  The poor pretender finch, she wanted to say.

  When she looked back on the early years of her marriage, Bella preferred to dwell on happier moments. The day Baby James said his first word. He heard Nick’s footfall outside and when his father pushed open the door, the child raised his fist in mock salute – as if he still saw the soldier in Nick though he had never known him in uniform – and out it came, triumphantly, two syllables, clear as a bell. Dada! Nick was as proud as Bella had ever seen him. He whisked the child off to the dairy for a toffee apple. Or she would recall seeing her girls setting off to the Model School, as she had once done. Bella had insisted they should get the best of schooling, though Nick had baulked at the fees. Babsie being the more robust and adventurous of the pair, usually took charge of these expeditions. She was a feisty little thing whereas Susan was complicated and secretive. Bella was forever on the lookout where Susan was concerned, vigilant for any slyness or cruelty of tongue or any weakness for fabulation, anything that might lead back to Leeper. She had decided from the time Susan could walk that she would have to be protected more than the others. She would not be sending her eldest out to work, Bella decided; no, she would keep her at home until she was ready to be wed so that history would not be allowed to repeat itself.

  Sundays in those early years were spent en famille. The entire Casey clan would descend for dinner. Mick and Tom, back on civvy street, were delighted to be in cahoots with their old pal, the Beaver, and even Mother deigned to visit. They were merry occasions over which Nick presided with a proprietary pride. He was in charge of portions and always saved the crackling for Mother or held back the white of the chicken for Bella. If Mick or Tom’s conversation got too boisterous, he would raise the carving knife and admonish them.