Fallen Read online

  ‘It’d make you want to straighten it, poor lamb,’ May said.

  I could just about make out the lettering on the belt buckle: Dieu et Mon Droit. I recognized it. ‘My brother is in the Dublins.’

  ‘So is my nephew,’ May said.

  We looked at each other. This was still new to me, the sudden sense of kinship with a stranger that came with hearing they were missing someone too.

  ‘Hubie is with the Seconds, in France,’ she said.

  ‘Liam is only in training. He’s plaguing everyone he knows for a transfer. He’s keen to get to the Front before it ends.’

  ‘Pray he doesn’t,’ Dote said.

  May reached her arm around my waist and squeezed it. She was smiling as wide a smile as I ever saw, but tears stood plain as pennies in her eyes.

  When we had clambered back into the cab and were on our way again, Dote said, ‘That Victoria commission changed John Hughes’s life, you know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He gave up his job in the School of Art and went to Paris to make it. He’s lived there ever since. It reminds me of what you said in the Mansion House, my dear, about vision and self-belief.’

  I was flattered that she remembered.

  As the cab brought us around the centre of town and then out along the quays to the Phoenix Park, she talked about the generals and patriots and statesmen the monuments commemorated, and about the men who designed and built them. She told us who had been paid for their work and who hadn’t, who’d died before a monument could be completed, who’d made rival bids, what they all went on to do after. She made me climb down from the cab and walk around the statues while she commented on their scale and location. She spoke about them as though they were living, breathing characters who should be as well known to me as members of my own family. ‘They’re memory-aids,’ she said. ‘And if we lose our memory, how do we know who we are?’

  They didn’t feel a part of my memory, not at all. A likeness of Luke Gardiner, whose influence was still visible in the lines of the streets, would have made more sense to me than these dead politicians and generals. But Dote’s enthusiasm for the statues and the men who had made them intrigued me. The notion of conceiving an idea and bringing something tangible into the world intrigued me too. There was something here I wanted, even if I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

  In the Phoenix Park, we got down from the cab near the Wellington obelisk. The cabman said he’d come back for us in an hour, and left to water the horse. It was a vivid October day, unusually warm. We took a short walk, then spread the tartan rug on the ground and sat on it to watch schoolboys kick a ball around the tussocky grass. The light was glorious. Given one last chance to show off their finery before it was put away for winter, the trees took full advantage and blazed, bronze, crimson and copper, under a high blue vault of sky.

  Dote sat on a sketching stool and drew blunt outlines of the obelisk with sticks of charcoal that turned her fingers black. ‘Of course, Wellington wasn’t liked in Dublin, any more than he liked it, or its citizens,’ she said. ‘The memorial committee ran out of money in the end. The monument stayed unfinished for years. They never did raise enough to pay for the horse that featured in the original design.’

  ‘How did they finish it?’ I asked.

  ‘They held a fund-raising dinner, in the vault. After, they didn’t bother to so much as clear the table before they closed it off. Huh!’ She’d her own way of laughing, through her nose.

  ‘You mean they left the dishes there, inside the monument?’

  ‘My dear, I mean they left the whole entire table and its settings. Chairs, linen, delft, crystal and all. They closed the vault and sealed it.’

  ‘And it’s all still in there?’ I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. I stared hard at the solid stone, as though it could dissolve and reveal the forgotten feast rotting behind it.

  ‘That’s not all.’ Her voice went thrillingly deep. ‘It was months before anyone remembered the butler. No one had seen him since that dinner, and he was never seen again.’

  ‘Did they not think to open it up and check?’

  ‘And spoil a good story?’ Dote looked at me over the half-rims of her glasses, her eyes very blue and alive under a charcoal smudge like a thumbprint on her forehead.

  ‘Lucky for him there was food and wine in it, so.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll do,’ May said. ‘She’ll do very nicely, Dote. Did you know, pet, we have fourteen nephews between us and not a single, solitary niece?’

  It never felt like work, to go to Percy Place. From the outset, I felt at home with Dote and May. Their house was a cosier, more cluttered version of our own. It had the same sash windows, the fan-lit front door, the hall with its internal arch and mouldings, the high window in the stairwell – Dote and May’s had stained-glass insets that added chips of colour to their already busy walls. Our rooms were bigger and our ceilings higher, but their basement kitchen was brighter and more open, and included a seating area. It opened directly on to a long back garden that led to a lane. Beyond the lane, longer back gardens led in their turn to the arrayed backs of a grander terrace, everything orderly and in proper proportions.

  I wondered how long it had been since Dote and May had entertained anyone for dinner, their dining room had such a feel of a long-established study. The oval walnut table Dote had commandeered was always strewn with an organized chaos of notes, stacks of index cards. My chair faced an array of historical maps of Dublin – maps by Rocque, Duncan and Harvey. The looming black mountains in the last felt ominous, menacing the city. My favourite was the seventeenth-century Speed map, with its child-like illustrations of houses and chapels and arches, the curved boats sketched on the irregular lines of the river before the quays were built, recalling a time when the ground beneath the foundations of this house was most likely swamp, when the houses in High Street used to shake every time a carriage rolled by. I had a degree in history but I’d known none of this ’til I met Dote.

  She paid for me to have typewriting lessons. She sent me to the National Library and to the readers’ cages of Marsh’s Library to confirm details, to the Registry of Deeds to check leases, even to Charlemont House, on my own Square, to establish dates of marriages and deaths. I had walked through the world blinkered, blind to its texture and deaf to its music; now I discovered cities within the city.

  I was glad to have things to write about in my letters to Liam. Dad began to ask me to sit with him in his study after dinner, as Liam used to do. He’d smoke his pipe and listen while I brought him up to date with the latest tale from our researches. ‘I’m glad you’re happy, Catkin,’ he said one night.

  Was I happy? I missed Liam. I worried about him. I read the war news in the papers every day, following the disasters and reversals of the stalled campaign as best I could. Even while he was still in training, I tried to guess where he was, what he might be doing, at any given time. What kind of danger he might be in. He was never far from my mind. But I did enjoy being useful and busy, and I liked having other things to talk about.

  April 1915

  The day we got the news that Liam had been killed began like any other. We hadn’t heard from him, not so much as a field postcard, for five days. I was uneasy, but it wasn’t the first time he’d gone quiet. At breakfast that morning, Dad said five days was no time. He said Liam’s silence meant nothing more than that he was busy. We all got up from the table and went about our separate business, not knowing that our life as a family – as that family – was over.

  As I walked down Sackville Street towards the National Library under a heavy sky after breakfast, I wondered what, exactly, Liam was so busy doing that he couldn’t write to us. I paid scant attention to the flower-sellers at the base of the Pillar, people waiting on trams, newsboys calling headlines, the smell of horses’ dung.

  Narrower streets stretched off to the left and the right of me, leading through the markets and past smaller, meaner shops to the t
enements. Women in shawls and full skirts who sold fruit and potatoes from barrels were already setting out their wares. And as I passed those streets, the traffic, those women – was Liam, in that very minute, crawling through muck trying to keep his precious rifle out of the wet? Playing cards in a dug-out? Taking aim? Lines from his letters scrolled through my mind, evoking their strange images: a grey-coated figure falling like a tree in a clearing, causing birds to clack and flap into a wheeling sky and vanish; the ghosts of leaves tumbling among echoes of snapping branches; mud underfoot and everywhere you looked. Rock-solid mud.

  Crossing the river, I glanced upstream at the Ha’penny Bridge, which would have been replaced by the Lutyens Gallery, if we’d had the money to build it. Designed to span the river so the light of the rising and setting sun would spill through its colonnade, it would have been a marvel. People would have come from all over to see it and the paintings it would have housed.

  Well. Big dreams that come to nothing are something of a speciality in Dublin. It aspires to be a city, but has the habits of a village.

  I went on across the bridge. The tide was high, so the river’s habitual stench was subdued by the smell of the sea. The blackish water made small, choppy, charcoal peaks that jostled each other. Seagulls screeched overhead. Clouds rushed together in a bumpy grey sky, trailing threads of would-be rain. To think that all the rivers in the world poured out into one great bowl of ocean – this, the Liffey, making its way to meet all the rivers and tributaries of France and Germany and Flanders, where Liam was. If he happened to be looking at a river now, any river …

  ‘Watch out!’ A woman with flowers in her hat-band shook my elbow. She scolded a child with a grubby face, thin as famine. ‘Gurrier,’ she called after him. ‘Guttersnipe!’ The boy ran, showing us the soles of filthy feet. He must have been frozen.

  She turned her attention to me then. ‘You should keep your wits about you. That wretched boy all but had his hand inside your pocket.’

  I walked on.

  I managed to hold the many things that might be keeping Liam busy at the very back of my mind while I worked in the reading room, making notes in pencil from a book propped open on its rest, surrounded by priests and students at the same sort of task. The high domed ceiling put me in mind of a skull, a brain, a mind. What did that make us, the readers?

  The Report of the O’Connell Monument Committee felt less than meaningless, but I spent all day with it. At half past five, my shoulders aching, I gathered my notes into my satchel and returned the Report to Mr Carton at the desk. Dandruff whitened the shoulders of his badly fitting jacket and his breath was meaty, but this man knew more about the holdings of the library than anyone else. I fancied that when the others went home at night, he stayed on, reading his way through the stacks by candlelight. There was no need for a catalogue when he was on duty.

  The high windows shivered as I reached him, a sound as though the sky were about to fall. We both looked up. Grey a few minutes ago, the windows had turned black as night. It was about to lash rain.

  ‘Filthy day, Miss Crilly. You should hurry on home. Will you be wanting this again?’

  ‘I’ve finished with it, thanks. I’ll need the Foundation prints tomorrow.’ I showed him the request form.

  He took it in a thin, age-spotted hand that had the faintest hint of a tremor. ‘I’ll have them ready when you come in. You can view them inside, in the Librarian’s office.’

  A massive clap of thunder rolled over his words. My mind flew to the guns on the Continent. It was said that people in some parts of England could hear them across the water. As if he knew what I was thinking, Mr Carton put his dry, papery hand on mine and patted it. ‘It’s only thunder.’

  I swung my satchel to my shoulder and hurried out, down the curved stone staircase and across the beautiful mosaics of the main hall’s floor, past the stained-glass windows, all without a second glance. I should have left sooner, to beat the weather, but I hadn’t noticed the storm closing in.

  Outside, I stood in the shelter of the portico and debated my options for getting home.

  A passer-by walking briskly up Kildare Street turned his head towards the library, and stopped when he saw me. ‘Katie!’

  ‘Con? Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?’

  He spread his arms wide, embracing his freedom, the day, even the coming storm. ‘Sure, I’m wasted there.’

  I had to laugh. There was something endearing about his willingness to show me his vanity. I took it as a sign of friendship.

  Con was more Liam’s friend than mine. They’d been at boarding school together, they both played rugby and liked to fish. Liam left that school before Con did, but because Con’s parents lived in Africa, he often came to stay with us for weekends and some school holidays. Mother had a soft spot for his big-framed good looks and his easy manners. She thought his floppy blond hair and pale blue eyes were angelic and she pitied his artificially parentless state.

  Unusually for a Catholic, Con had gone to Trinity. Mother did not hold this against him. All through college he had a standing invitation to Sunday lunch at our house. You’d swear he never had a meal anywhere else, the way Mother used to pile his plate with food and insist he eat up every scrap. She thought he could do no wrong.

  Con’s set, the Trinity medical students, were wild. I envied their adventures. Liam, who went along on some of them, said they were nothing to write home about – money on horses and dogs, late-night drinking in smoky shebeens – they wouldn’t suit me at all. I’d have liked the chance to decide for myself, but it never came.

  I left the shelter of the portico and went out to Con. The street bristled, a sound like autumn leaves skittering away from a stiff wind.

  There was something dishevelled about him, his coat unbuttoned. Straw-like curls fell across his forehead. He caught my hands in his. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes, Katie! What have you been up to, setting fire to all the dry old learnings with that hair of yours?’ He gave a loose strand of my hair a little tug.

  I hooked the hair behind my ear. ‘That’s right. Have you come to put them out with your wit?’ I turned down the street, towards Trinity.

  He walked alongside me, even though he’d just come up that way. ‘Have you heard from Liam?’

  ‘Not since last week. Have you?’

  ‘I’m not the best correspondent, I’m afraid. He’ll be all right, Katie. It does no good to worry.’

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me I could make myself ill, I’m sick of hearing it.’ A few angry paces later, I said, more calmly, ‘Where have you been?’

  He nodded at the windows of the Kildare Street Club. ‘Lunch.’

  ‘Long lunch.’

  He laughed. ‘And where are you off to, might I ask?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘Would you be amenable to persuasion, distraction, deviation of any kind?’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘Supper?’

  ‘I thought you just finished lunch.’

  We’d reached the corner. The air shivered and broke open in a sudden downpour. Con gripped my wrist and swept me in under a grocer’s awning. I smelled wine on his breath. The world washed away in a storm of water that drummed like stones on the canvas, dripped down my neck and into my eyes. Its fall made a cave of the canopy that sheltered us, hiding us from the world – if the world had been watching, which it wasn’t, everyone intent on finding their own shelter. The street was suddenly empty but for a single, sway-backed horse, ears down and shivering in the shafts of a cart, one hind leg bent as though it had a bad shoe. A tram hissed past. We were surrounded by crates of apples, red and gold and green.

  Inside our sudden tent, in the fermenting smell of apples and wine and rain, his warm fingers lifted my hand and turned it, palm up, to kiss the blue veins at my wrist. He gave my arm a gentle tug, bringing me closer to him. How very near he was. I had never stood so close to a man before, face to face and almost touching. I was hot sand in a
n hourglass, falling, his bulk there to contain me.

  A sharp knock rattled the glass. From inside the shop, the grocer, in his dull brown apron, shook his fist at us. ‘Mind that window! I’ll be having ye, if it breaks. If ye’re not buying …’

  ‘Making a show of me.’ I took my hand back to push Con away and went out into the rain. He let me go.

  I kept my head down and hurried home, glad of the storm. It would explain the state I was in, soaked, breathless, loose hair clinging to my cheeks. My mind raced ahead of me.

  I’d last seen Con at a supper party. I’d been put beside Danny Tobin, a famous bore, with a plea from our hostess to keep him entertained. I was spinning a yarn and Danny was smiling, loosening, so that I began to see possibilities in him, when I felt a tiny shock, as if something had reached across the table and touched my throat. I looked over at Con, whose face glowed out of the gloom directly opposite me. A candelabra burned between us, more candles on the mantel behind his head. Their light was doubled in the enormous mirror; it blazed around the pale blur of my own face, looking back at me from over his shoulder. I forgot what I’d been saying, turned my face to the plate. Con leaned back in his chair and laughed. Under the table, his foot came to rest beside mine.

  But what did it mean? I’d seen Con flirt with other women, seen how they would turn to him, all smiles and glittering eyes. His touch, today, surprised me. There was the ordinary skin of my inner wrist, laid bare. When he turned it over and put his lips to its branching veins, something happened. His breath on my skin. My pulse at his mouth. My mind flowered with thoughts I’d never had in daylight, of other hinged places, how they might open.

  Could I give my life over to Con, as Eva had to Bartley? I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry anyone. But, if I didn’t, what would I do with my life? The truth of it was that I didn’t know what a person like me was for.

  Near the end of Sackville Street, I walked the median, for the slight shelter of the young plane trees. I couldn’t wait to get indoors, to run upstairs and peel off my wet clothes in front of the fire that would be waiting for me in Liam’s room. Thank God for Lockie.