The Rising of Bella Casey Page 9

‘Oh, Clarrie and I were just taking the air, as it happens. The music was a pure bonus,’ Bella said.

  The Corporal smiled.

  ‘This is my friend, Clarice Hamilton,’ Bella said. Clarrie extended her hand in her forthright way.

  ‘Oh look,’ she said to Bella, ‘it only says MOTHER.’

  She was back to the tattoo, a garland of indigo at the Corporal’s wrist, which had always been eclipsed by cuffs or gloves before. He had the grace to look confused.

  ‘Any news of those brothers of yours?’

  ‘Oh they’re doing fine,’ Bella replied. ‘As far as we can make out, though Mick is forever being confined to barracks or put on latrine duty. For what he does not say.’

  ‘For unspecified misdemeanours, no doubt,’ the Corporal said with a wry smile.

  Clarrie was still hovering, against all instructions.

  ‘And how’s Jack?’

  ‘He’s quite the grown-up now going to big school at St Barnabas. I don’t see as much of him now that Mother and he have moved away.’

  A salient fact Bella was determined to smuggle into the conversation.

  The Corporal played with his dress gloves. Bella fixed on his tattoo, the letters cast in red, entwined in what looked like thorns. Go, she urged Clarrie with her eyes, go.

  ‘I don’t suppose I could interest you in a turn on the pier,’ he asked finally when Clarrie insisted on standing there, mute. ‘It’d be a pure disgrace to have come all this way and not enjoy the scenery.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Clarrie agreed heartily.

  ‘Perhaps your friend would like to join us?’

  Time for the sick auntie line, Bella thought, come on, Clarrie. How often had they rehearsed this!

  Just then another soldier appeared, another Liverpools’ man, broad and plain-looking, years older than the Corporal.

  ‘Ah Nick, me old compadré,’ he said and clapped his hand on the Corporal’s shoulder. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’

  ‘Clarice Hamilton,’ Clarrie interposed and shook his hand in that manly way of hers.

  ‘Vizard,’ the squat man replied and his plain face broke into a wreath of smiles. ‘Corporal James Vizard. Charmed, I’m sure.’

  The newly introduced pair moved ahead while Bella dawdled behind with the Corporal.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of the first time we courted,’ the Corporal was saying as he and Bella strolled towards the glaring brine. ‘That evening of your father’s funeral, God be good to him.’

  Bella blushed to think of it. Pappie was never far away, much and all as she might wish it in this particular instance.

  ‘Oh,’ she replied, a mite too hastily she feared, ‘but we have met several times since then. There was the bazaar and sure haven’t you paid your respects in Dominick Street, too?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he conceded, ‘but I don’t count those. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very partial to Mrs C and all, though I think she’s on the outs with me for me for leading her darling boys astray.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Bella lied.

  ‘Ah, Bel,’ he said. It was the first time he had used her name in that candid way, the way a sweetheart might. ‘You know what I’m driving at. We were always in company, is all I’m saying.’

  He halted and took her arm, placing it in the crook of his.

  ‘But that first night on Sackville Street,’ he said ‘you were quite the spitfire.’

  How strange that he should remember her forwardness when what she recalled of the evening was her tears. She summoned up all of her false courage.

  ‘And can be again,’ she said and reached up and kissed him full on the lips in broad daylight so as he could not be in any doubt.

  She wore her blue chenille with the leg-of-mutton sleeves, her black garibaldi jacket with the military braiding and her two-tone boots with the Louis heels. She put her hair up in a French twist and donned her straw boater with the polka-dot band. She chose a corner booth in Bewley’s at the solemn back of the noisy café. Wan afternoon light streamed in as she unpeeled her gloves and laid them on the marble-topped table. Her new boots were pinching. On top of that, a pebble had lodged itself between the sole and her stockings, and all through the encounter she was aware of it, a tiny irritant, a chafing presence. She was early, deliberately so, and was hoping that the Corporal would not be too late for she would have to guard against someone else asking to share the table. A young woman alone in a café could attract the wrong sort of attention … The minutes ticked by and she felt most singular, despite the shelter of the maroon-coloured upholstery and the wood-panelled walls. The waitress didn’t help, coming up to her and licking her pencil ostentatiously and with a stern jib, standing over her with a peremptory ‘Yes Miss?’ – as if Bella were some kind of street-walker looking for a free sit-down. Bella was about to tell her that she was waiting to be joined by a gentleman, when the Corporal arrived. He was a vision of gold and crimson, the flurry of the street still about him. He included the waitress, Bella noticed, in his broad smile of greeting.

  ‘Apols,’ he said, ‘for the delay.’

  Bella rose immediately and held her two bare hands out to him.

  ‘Nicholas darling,’ she said in her most cultivated tone for the benefit of the little waitress.

  ‘Bel,’ he said doubtfully.

  But it had the desired effect. Vanquished, the waitress, who had tried to make her feel so unworthy, took the order and slunk away.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ Bella said for she knew she must take charge at once. And the Corporal sat, obedient as a scolded child.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘the schoolmarm is never off-duty, I see.’

  ‘We’ll take tea here and then …’

  ‘And then …?’ He arched his eyebrows sardonically.

  ‘Then, Nicholas Beaver, you can escort me home and if you’re very good …’

  *

  She excused herself once they arrived at Dominick Street and went directly to the bedroom, asking the Corporal to wait. She lifted her hat carefully from her head and shrugged off her jacket, placing both on the chair by the bed. Her fingers trembled as she undid her boots. She unhooked her stockings, thinking how carefully she had donned these items not three hours before. She looked at herself in the mirror before she went on, but she didn’t linger on the reflection. Instead, she took a deep breath and readied herself for the performance.

  ‘Can you help me with this?’ she asked going to the portal of the bedroom with her back turned. She loosed her hair, baring her nape. The blue chenille had a finicky row of buttons down the back. The Corporal came up behind her and made his way down, undoing each cloth-covered bulb until he reached the seat of her spine. When he was finished she freed her arms and peeled the bodice of the dress away so that it swaddled her waist. She could feel his breath on her neck as she stepped out of the skirts. Once she didn’t have to face him, she could do this, she told herself.

  ‘And now the corset,’ she said, sounding to herself like a teacher, going through the alphabet of her apparel.

  He deftly undid the lacing – men must have more practice with these, she thought – and she lifted it away, letting it slide to the floor. The whalebone made it stand, not fall. It was like her last piece of armour. Swiftly she stepped out of her petticoat which sighed at her ankles. Now there was only her pantaloons and chemise. He needed no further commands to help. The chemise got tangled around her face and for a moment she was swathed in white, breathing in muslin. If she could have stayed in this cocoon she would have, but he whipped it off and threw it to the floor, impatient now, she could sense. Still she could not face him. He fingered the drawstring on her pantaloons.

  ‘Turn around,’ he said.

  And on his knees, he drew them down.

  Before Leeper, Bella had thought her innocence of the brutish intimacies of congress as a kind of refinement. A superior state. Mother had never spoken of the act or gone into the sordid Facts of Life. The mystery of the passions of men and women
remained that – a mystery. The only glimpses Bella had had was down on the canal bank in the dark or among the low talk of drinkers let out on the street at closing time.

  ‘Bel, Bel,’ he kept on saying as though cajoling her, when persuasion wasn’t necessary. Surely he must have noticed how readily she submitted. There was no struggle this time. When he fell upon her his weight seemed a nestling and her own abdication was like the unfurling of a sail, an airy thing, not a despairing surrender as before. She’d only known violent storm; now she learned that there could be gentle passages too, glassy lagoons where stillness gave way to piercing spears of red-lined pleasure, her own unexpectedly so, and so soon after … no, she would not think of that. She tried to block out the memory of Leeper’s bestial howls, as Nick went about his careful excavation. Yet, when the time came, he was so silent she was not sure that it was done. It was a moment of fierce solemnity, like a bridal vow, she thought. As if he sensed, somehow, the gravity of their union. (Years afterwards, he used to wax lewd about that first time – the convict and the soldier learn to do it quiet, he would say.) His ardour for consummation matched her own, it seemed, the only difference being that hers was full of avid calculation.

  ‘I thought you would look down on the likes of me,’ he said afterwards as they lay together in the becalmed sheets.

  ‘But you have travelled further and seen the world.’

  ‘Well, England,’ he conceded, ‘Gibraltar and the Isle of Man.’

  ‘Further than I’ve ever been.’

  ‘And where would you go, Bella Casey, if you had a magic wand?’

  ‘I’d go to Paris!’

  ‘Ooh-la-la!’ he mocked.

  She did not proceed with that line of talk. She didn’t want to come over as high-faluting. Though it was hard to see how she could be accused of that in this state, her hair in riotous tumult and her breasts wantonly exposed and Nick fondling them.

  ‘How are my two girls?’ he whispered to her nipples. He peered at her between the hills of her flesh. It became a joke between them, her breasts his offspring, until he had daughters, that is.

  ‘I had you down for prim and proper, Bella Casey, but look at you now, stretched out like a strumpet …’

  The word made Bella flinch. A Jezebel, according to Leeper and now a strumpet. But from Nick’s lips, it was said with mischief not venom. In any case, with all her wily machinations, she could hardly deny it. She could barely recognise herself – where was the girl who’d been too high-and-mighty to trouble herself with young men, who’d considered herself above all that? The girl who’d told Lily Clesham she would only consent to marriage to a schoolmaster or a clergyman? The girl who swore she’d never strike a child in her charge?

  ‘A penny for them,’ Nick said when she made no reply.

  She roused herself. She could not afford to lapse into self-recrimination. She must finish this performance and persuade with it.

  ‘Don’t my thoughts merit silver?’ she asked brightly.

  Nick guffawed loudly and rolled her in his arms.

  ‘You do too much thinking, Bella Casey. In future,’ he warned all mock-stern, ‘you’ll leave your thinking cap behind when you lay down with me.’

  And then it was Bella’s turn to smile. His joking words had betrayed him. She had, it seemed, manoeuvred Nick Beaver into seeing a future with her.

  THE ART OF NECESSITY

  Although she knew it not to be true, Bella liked to think it was on one of those balmy full-leafed summer nights that Susan was conceived. Was it a crime to refashion the fabric of the facts, a nip here, a tuck there, in order to arrive at another truth? The truth of one’s best intentions. She had courted disaster purposefully with Nick several times by then. What did she care for her good name since it had already been taken from her? And she had to be sure. When she was sure, she sent a letter to the barracks, asking Nick to come, for even after the conjugal intimacies they’d enjoyed, his appearances were mercurial. She hoped she would not have too long a wait. The task at hand was predicated on time and she was nearly three months along now. She kept her distance from Mother lest her eagle eye might light on Bella’s roundening. She invented a story that her bicycle was punctured and hoped that this might pass as explanation for not visiting. It troubled her, all this dissembling, how one lie begot another, however innocuous.

  The worst part of the business altogether was that there was still no word from Nick. She tried to be the pattern of all patience as the leaves began to fall and the mellow month of September gave way to October. The infants brought polished conkers and chestnut cones to school and they made a Harvest Table. She looked at the children more closely now, appraising each one as if he were standing in comparison to her own. Would he be dark like little Jack’s friend, Georgie Ecret, or angelic like Thomas Bryson, or frankly loud like Hubert Weir? Such dreamy meditations were a way to stem her rising panic as the weeks went by and there was only silence from Nick. Even Miss Quill was beginning to suspect something, she feared. Had she heard her early morning retching, for often she would have to run to the lavatory before class? If she knew what ailed Bella, she might report her, for Miss Quill was most upright in matters pertaining to the efficient running of the school. She sent another note, this one more peremptory than the first, so that if Nick did not know the nature of her indisposition, he must surely recognise the urgency of her appeal.

  After another month had gone by without so much as a word, she decided she must take action. One Saturday, wearing her charcoal grey cambric dress the low buttons of which were already straining, and her most sober hat, she made her way to Beggars’ Bush Barracks.

  ‘Yes, my love.’

  The soldier who threw the door open had lately finished his lunch. The crumbs were still on his tunic, which he didn’t trouble himself to brush off. He had a cockney accent, cheeky, disrespectful.

  ‘And now, my darling, what can we do for you?’

  He swung out from the lintel; from the brown inside Bella could hear the sniggering of others unseen. She did not know how many more were in there but they made enough noise for an entire company.

  ‘Looking for a soldier, is you?’

  ‘I’m here to see Lance Corporal Beaver of the King’s Liverpools, First Battalion,’ Bella said drawing herself up to her full height.

  ‘My, my, hark at this, a lady for a lance corporal!’

  There were guffaws within.

  ‘And does her ladyship have an appointment?’

  He was standing in the doorway his arm across the jamb as if she might try to storm the place. He was a bunty man, able to exercise his authority over her only because the guardroom door was atop a few stone steps.

  ‘I mean, does ’e know you’re coming?’

  Boots thumped on the floorboards within as if they were viewing a chorus girl at the Tivoli. Was this the type of company her Nick favoured? Was this the sort of smutty talk that passed for conversation among his ilk?

  ‘First Liverpools, is it?’

  He dipped behind the door and drew out a large ledger. He ran his fingers down the columns then he looked up at Bella regretfully.

  ‘No, Miss, you won’t be seeing no lance corporal today, so if it’s ring papers you is after, you’re out of …’

  Is that how she appeared? Some desperate doxy chasing a uniform? How dare he!

  ‘Excuse me, I’ll thank you not to be so pass-remarkable.’

  ‘No need to get uppity with me, Miss. We get a lot of your sort round here looking for their due. Or they’d settle for a fuzzy-wuzzy some of them, the state they’re in.’ He then beat his buttoned tunic with his fists like some primitive baboon and let out a halloo. On such yahoos the honour and dignity of the Empire relied.

  ‘If it were up to me, my darling, you could ’ave the entire regiment, but Liverpools ain’t here at present.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked suddenly fearing that Nick had been posted to some far-flung parts.

  ‘Manou
evres, my sweet. Bet your Corpoal Beaver knows a thing or two ’bout that. Manoeuvres is right.’

  There was a music hall roar from inside.

  ‘Run along my darling, for there’ll be no fun for you today. The Liverpools are in the Curragh on musketry and won’t be back this way till December. Hope you’re sure of him, so, for he’ll have been gallivanting with those wrens down there. They lives in ditches and offer up their services to all and sundry. You’ll have to find another, my pet. May I introduce myself? Private Terence Stackpoole at your service, Ma’am!’

  He clicked his heels together and bowed extravagantly.

  ‘December?’

  ‘Are you hard o’ hearing or something?’ He leaned his coarse face towards her. ‘Now, sap, sap, before I set the dawgs on you.’

  His companions duly set up a raucous barrage of barking and with that uncouth racket ringing in her ears, she was dismissed.

  Violet Quill was perplexed. She’d noticed a change in Miss Casey she couldn’t account for. She and the Infant Teacher enjoyed only the most formal association, but it had always been cordial. Unless one of them was indisposed, the folding doors between their two rooms remained closed and they maintained separate kingdoms. She knew nothing of her young colleague’s life beyond the classroom and being burdened with the care of her elderly mother in Harold’s Cross, she did not linger in school after hours but had to rush home to the sick room. Their conversations for the most part ran to comments on the weather or discussions about ordering fuel and stationery. Miss Casey was twenty years her junior and Miss Quill felt acutely the restrictions of her own closeted life. What did she know of dances or entertainments? Not that there was any complaint about Miss Casey’s conduct in that regard. No, no, no, quite the contrary. She was a serious, conscientious girl. But lately Miss Quill noticed the tremor of argument in her demeanour. Just yesterday, she had come across her bent double over the schoolroom stove.

  ‘Is everything all right, Miss Casey,’ she’d enquired.