The Rising of Bella Casey Page 7

  Mother saw red.

  ‘I’m sure your Beaver put them up to it,’ she said to Bella in surly tone. How quickly he had become her Beaver, when, alas, he was no such thing.

  ‘Prancing about in full fig,’ she said, ‘and filling my sons up with notions.’

  As if the Corporal had seduced them into the ranks.

  ‘If they were officers itself,’ Mother raged, ‘but in the ranks along with porter-swilling RCs!’

  In whose company they’d hardly stand out, Bella thought, but kept her lip buttoned.

  She understood why Mother was fretting. She was depending on the boys’ pay packets to keep her head above water. They had both joined the Post Office, Mick as a telegraph clerk and Tom on a district route. Such positions might not have answered the ambitions Pappie had held out for them – he had paid for drawing lessons for Mick in the hope that he would go on to be an architect. But at least the boys earned steady money and army pay, by comparison, was downright measly. Mother would be left with only young Isaac’s office boy’s wages to keep them all afloat.

  ‘If you could see your way to it, Bella,’ Mother said in a wheedling tone, ‘to have us in your quarters then it would ease our lot.’

  It was a strange reversal for Mother to be depending on her and it was a pleasant sensation to be in the position of offering salvation. And for it be seen as a great favour. In other circumstances she might have resented the invasion, but Bella saw immediately the advantages of the new arrangement. If there was one thing likely to deter Leeper’s advances (she refused privately to call him Reverend), it was a fierce mother and two noisy youngsters. Foiled, she thought victoriously.

  ‘Of course you must move in, Mother,’ she said luxuriating in the noblesse oblige. ‘It will be like old times.’

  THE VENUS ROOM

  Two women in the one kitchen was not a recipe for harmony, Bella was to discover. She was grateful for Mother’s housewifery, a hot meal on the table, a welcome fire in the grate, and she was happy to be surrounded by the cherished items of home – Pappie’s chair, the table they had supped at as a family, the painting of Trafalgar – even though crushed into her two small rooms they gave her quarters the aspect of an overstocked warehouse. The most treasured piece, however, had not made the journey. The Elysian had to be sold off for it was impossible to hoik a piano up the narrow staircase to Bella’s quarters. But despite the presence of these familiar tokens, and the clamour of Isaac and Jack that made the place feel full, it never took on the hue of home. Perhaps, without Pappie, there would never be home again, Bella thought. She could have talked to Pappie about Balzac and Dickens, but her conversations with Mother could not roam far beyond household linens and the price of turnips. Even in concerns she and her mother could have shared, disputes were quick to arise. She would try to interest Mother in her worries about a roomful of infants in smocks and petticoats. Illness nested among them – chesty coughs settled like a damp fog in their number, rashes spread, scabs multiplied. But Mother considered such talk an imposition.

  ‘Haven’t I my own to worry about?’ she would snap when Bella would fret aloud about Norman Symonds or Herbert Pratt.

  One evening they nearly came to blows over a minor mishap. Bella had cleared a space at the table to do some preparation for her classes. She had propped a copy of Geography Generalised against a jug and taken down a volume of the Popular Encyclopaedia, laying it open at Galileo. Miss Quill had been kept away with a severe case of bronchitis – probably picked up from one of her charges – so Bella had had to throw open the folding doors that usually separated the infants from First and Second Class and teach all of them at once. It was bedlam, running back and forth between them trying to keep all gainfully occupied. Bella had been trying to teach the older ones about the planets, their names and their movements but had found nothing in Miss Quill’s desk that was of service to her. As she was poring over the Encyclopaedia (she was buying the entire volume on the instalment plan from a travelling salesman), Jack sidled up to her.

  ‘What are you doing, Bella?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m reading about the planets and the stars,’ she replied.

  ‘What is the stars?’

  ‘What are the stars, Jack?’ she began, for despite being now under her tutelage, his grammar owed more to his playmates than his book learning. But that aside, it was a good question and Bella had no ready answer. How would Pestalozzi instruct children about the heavens? He would use everyday objects, Bella, she said to herself. Pestalozzi never failed her. Beside the jug was a pair of oranges. She picked the oranges up and one in each hand, she traced the trajectory of the earth and the sun on the cloth. She scattered a spoonful of sugar across the navy calico.

  ‘These are the stars,’ she said.

  ‘Mind, Bella, mind,’ Mother said crossly, ‘that cloth went on fresh this morning.’

  ‘Leave us be, Mother, I’m showing Jack something important here,’ Bella muttered. ‘About the planets.’

  ‘Oh excuse me pardon, your ladyship,’ Mother cried. ‘Is the stars more important than keeping the place respectable? A house don’t keep itself, I’ll have you know! Some slavey has to keep it so, when there are some too high and mighty to lift a finger!’

  And with one flick of her hand she swept away the heavens.

  But these were minor irritations when compared with the reprieve she enjoyed from the Reverend Leeper. With Mother and the boys in residence, he stopped making evening visitations to her door. Jack had started in the infant class. He was like a lucky charm keeping the Reverend at bay. She encouraged him to stay in the schoolroom after hours so she could do her tidying and records without fear of interruption. At the church she devised another way to stymie him. She feigned a friendship with Mrs Lecky, the foghorn of the choir.

  ‘Mrs Lecky,’ she would say at the end of practice, ‘could you help me gather the hymnals?’

  Or she would offer to walk her home after evening service for Mrs Lecky, though a stout matron, was of a nervous disposition and lonely with it. Mabel Lecky would not have been her natural choice of companion, but Bella had learned from teaching that there are adults, no more than children, who bask in the attention of being singled out. Mrs Lecky was one such. In truth, she found Mrs Lecky tiresome. A widow who’d worn the weeds for nigh on twenty years, she spoke of her husband as if he had dispensed the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount.

  ‘The late Mr Lecky always said there’s nothing like a spring day to lift the spirits, wasn’t he right, Miss Casey?’

  In time, Bella found herself railing inwardly against the sheer number of the dead man’s commonplaces. But she shamelessly employed Mrs Lecky’s appetite for a ready ear. She might have had to suffer long monologues about Henry Lecky’s dining habits, his interest in plant propagation, the indignity of his gout, but it was a small price to pay to sidestep the Reverend Leeper.

  It was to be three months before Bella saw Corporal Beaver gain. When they returned, the First Liverpools were stationed at Beggar’s Bush Barracks only a mile or two distant and the Corporal took to visiting occasionally.

  ‘It’s himself again,’ Mother would announce if it was she who answered the door, not granting him the civility of a greeting or a name.

  In his company, Mother would often be silent and shoot glares at him. Bella knew she blamed the Corporal for the disruption of her domestic arrangements and the fact that her two boys were beyond in barracks in England. Without saying a word, she made her disapproval clear and the Corporal couldn’t fail to notice.

  ‘Have I done something to upset Mrs C?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ Bella said, ‘she’s only being sour.’

  But she found herself inventing excuses to get away from her mother’s baleful presence. Despite the obstacles thrown in her way, she determined that she must keep him sweet. If the weather was fine, they would go for a stroll down Dominick Street and do a couple of rounds of Rutland Square, although she suspected th
e Corporal might have preferred an alehouse snug. As she had promised, she took him to the schoolroom.

  ‘Is that where you stand?’ he asked, climbing on to the teacher’s pedestal.

  ‘Very rarely,’ she told him, ‘for in the teaching of infants there is no good insisting that you perch on high. Already we tower over them!’

  He laughed and she put her fingers to her lips for fear, somehow, that they might be overheard. The imminence of Reverend Leeper oppressed her even at times like this on a Saturday afternoon when she knew he would be off on his sick visitations. But she knew if he came across them here, he would berate her for an ‘unwarranted intrusion on school premises’. (So accustomed had she become to his tyranny that she could speak his language in her head.)

  One day she took the Corporal to view the Venus Room two floors above the schoolroom for indeed that was a spectacle. It had been a ballroom once when the house on Dominick Street had been a private residence. The ceilings were encrusted with intricate plasterwork, with gilded brows done by the master stuccodore Robert West, as she told the Corporal. Overhead there were garlands and fat fruits, the raised wings of birds. Two shimmering chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The walls of the ballroom were mirrored, as were the entry doors, so when you were inside, it was like being inside a silvery cage. The maple floor made a sweet warbling when they stepped on to it for it was high sprung for dancing.

  ‘Care for a turn?’ the Corporal asked in that amused way of his. Bella never quite knew if he was in earnest or mocking her.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Well, it is a ballroom. The plasterwork is all very fine and good, but it was meant for dancing. I daresay no one has stepped out here in an age. Don’t suppose that dryballs of a curate would allow it.’

  Bella let the soldierly language pass since it pertained to the Reverend and she would not make any defence of him. The Corporal held out his arms and he provided the music, though he had neither drum nor fife. He hummed the tune of a waltz, ‘Over the Waves’, as they circled around the echoing ballroom seeing themselves reflected in every surface – his braid matched by the encrustations of the room – so that it appeared that the place was sprouting with couples and the room full. He swept Bella around in a generous arc and her breath was coming in a quick rush.

  ‘We could be at a Castle Ball,’ she said breathlessly to him, a trifle embarrassed even as she said it, for it reminded her of something witless Prudence Collier from the College might have said.

  ‘Ah now, steady on, Bel,’ the Corporal said in a chastising tone and he came to a halt so that they stood, their arms still raised, frozen in thin air. The crowds in the glass fell away. ‘The nearest a chap like me will get to the Castle will be on sentry duty outside.’

  The spell of the mirrors was broken.

  Was it her giddy talk of Castle Balls that frightened him off? Or had he tired of Mother’s cool welcome? Whatever the reason, it was after the visit to the Venus Room that his appearances began to be fitful, to say the least. Bella wondered whether it was just the association with the family that Nicholas Beaver enjoyed, some fond remembrance of comradely times with Mick and Tom that had kept him coming to Dominick Street. Or had he found a prettier, more accommodating girl who was keeping him away? If only the Corporal were her fiancé itself, but the understanding between them was nowhere near that advanced and Bella could see no way to make it so.

  THE STRIKING OF ALFIE

  BAXTER

  ‘Isabella?’

  Soft and low. So soft and low Bella thought she could pretend not to hear it. She hurriedly quenched the candle and sat in the darkness. She had been darning a pair of stockings – her boots were forever cutting through her hosiery. She sat, needle poised, afeared that he might hear its silvery movement. She held her breath in the miserable hope that receiving no response he might be discouraged and go away. He rapped again, a little louder and mouthed her name again. Even the thought of his lips brushing up against the grain of her door made her quail.

  ‘Isabella,’ he urged.

  She laid down her needle and clenched her fists and begged God and the darkness that he might go away. But it was all in vain. It was as if he smelled her yearning – not for him but against him – and took possession of it. He rapped again, this time with blunt authority.

  ‘Miss Casey,’ he said in his most stentorian tone, ‘I command you to open the door at once. I have urgent business to discuss on behalf of the School Guardians. I know you’re in there and I will not desist until you answer.’

  She went to the door and inched it open a fraction.

  ‘It’s very late, Reverend Leeper, and a most inconvenient time,’ she whispered. ‘My little brother is abed, he’s been feverish all day and I fear a visit would only wake him.’

  ‘Do not resort to falsehoods, Miss Casey, it ill-becomes you.’

  He knew then. It had not taken him long to get a whiff of her new solitude. After six months, Mother and the boys had moved out, having heard tell of a house in the East Wall that was going at a reasonable rent. It was a pleasant little cottage with a garden out front, a neat front parlour and a yard with private facilities. The neighbourhood was peopled by a motley assortment of tradespeople, sailors and ship’s captains, the steady tramp of the blowers to the bottling plant, gaggles of girls off to shift work at the match factory, mechanics and shunters employed at the railway yards. It being farther out of the city than her other addresses, you could catch the whiff of the sea there clearly and the wind had a way of whistling at the gables as if eager to be on the brine itself and not tangled up in narrow enclosed streets. It might not have had the grandeur of Dorset Street, but the house in East Wall was cosy, or at least Mother would make it so. Despite the rancour between them, it had made Bella forlorn to imagine the burst of spring cleaning that would accompany their arrival as Mother busied herself with the settling in. There would be the washing of the windows, the beating of rugs, the hunting down of fleas in the upholstery and ticking …

  ‘Let me in, if you please, Miss Casey.’

  The Reverend pushed past her and sniffed. The air was singed with the smell of the just-guttered candle. He stood, as if paralysed, with his back to Bella.

  ‘It’s no good, Isabella,’ he said finally and turned around with a defeated air.

  The reiteration of her name encouraged a new dread. His officious self Bella could deal with, but this frank softness frightened her.

  ‘These past months have been an agony for me, as I know they must have been for you. But you are a dutiful daughter as I have been a dutiful husband.’

  ‘Reverend Leeper,’ she interjected.

  ‘No, no, no, Isabella,’ he said raising his hand, ‘it must be declared. I have prayed, nay I have stormed heaven but …’ Here he paused again and a strangled groan emanated from him like a door in need of oiling. ‘But I am a man of the flesh, a weak man …’

  He made his move then, not like a weak man at all, and manacled her in a fierce embrace. His whole frame trembled, but not, she sensed, with weakness but with power. He groaned again as if holding her thus was a pain to him.

  ‘Reverend Leeper,’ she said, desperately trying to wrestle free.

  ‘Darling Isabella, don’t fight against it. It is too powerful for either of us.’

  He pinioned her wrists behind her as he plastered her cheeks with greedy, moist kisses. She tried to avert her face, but he clasped her jaw in his hand and crushed her mouth like some soft, ripe fruit between his fingers.

  ‘You little vixen,’ he snarled, ‘are you trying to madden me?’

  ‘No,’ she cried, but her feeble nay counted for nothing.

  He placed one hand on the nape of her neck and the other in a vice grip around her waist and Bella could feel all the fight in her seep away. She thought of her neat teacher’s quarters, her schoolroom below with the mottoes on the blackboard, her years at her books when other girls were running around only interested in getting ring-papers for th
emselves. And she thought of her Principal Teacher’s salary, forty pounds a year all in, and to her shame, she yielded.

  Dawn had spread its icy fingers through the casements before she could rouse herself. She had lain slumped all night in the place where she had been broken into, her blouse ripped from shoulder to waist, buttons orphaned on the floor, her skirts and bloomers down around her ankles, her feet still shod – the only innocent part of her. Her hair, matted and snagged, fell over her bare shoulders. She clutched at the remnants of her chemise to cover the nakedness of her breasts, remembering how he had scrabbled at them as if he wished to peel back the very skin that clothed her. There were scrape marks on her arms – for all the world like she’d tangled with a thorn tree – where his talons had dug in. She must have slept, but it felt more like a withered waking, her nerves alive with a kind of readied startlement, for fear he would return. She had curled into a ball against the skirting, sinking as low as she could. Her limbs grew stiff, her blood ran cold as a step-mother’s breath. Her skin was like veined marble where it had been scraped and torn, her mouth smarted. Her breasts, when she dared to look, were blood-bruised. Finally she managed to haul her body – for it felt separate to her like a heavy weight, a dead thing – into the bedroom. She lay gratefully on the unmolested bed and slept fitfully for an hour or so, still in her desecrated clothes, until a distant clock chimed seven. Then she rose and painfully made her way down the back stairs to collect water in a pail. It boiled laboriously on the hob – everything seemed to take an age as if time had dropped to a slower march. She drew out the tin bath and poured the water in. She sank into it gingerly and scrubbed every inch of skin until it was red raw. Then she heaved herself out, creakily, for she felt as old as a crone troubled with rheumatics, and covered herself hurriedly so that she would not see the mutilations or be reminded of the ones she couldn’t see.