Beatrice Read online

  She has walked around your shores a thousand times, An Loch Bán. And she has looked for herself in your glassy depths. You pull her, and your bed is infinite. This morning the reeds are frosted and sparkling. This makes them shine like sticks of gold. They stick out of your surface, which looks like treacle. You are frozen. She places her bare foot upon you. You do not crack. She puts her other foot upon you. Both feet are stinging, stuck to the cold ice. Can she trust you?

  She sees a little girl skating on the lake in her wellies. She waves at her, and the girl waves back, but you are cracking beneath her, so she shouts to the little girl to warn her. Then she looks back down at the ice; it has thawed so fast. She looks up again, prepared to rescue the child, but she’s gone.

  Was it a dream?

  She jumps back onto the bank. You splash her ankles and your iciness burns. She is scalded. It is time to move on.

  EITHNE

  Do you know that painting by Whistler? The one of his mother? She’s sitting on a chair, in profile, all alone. The picture is called Arrangement in Grey and Black. That was how my mother seemed for five whole years. A composition of funeral tones. From the time I was thirteen to the day I turned eighteen we hardly exchanged more than a few words. All I remember is her sitting on her chair, her back to the door, staring out of the window. She would scan the fields and the distant hills again and again, hoping for a speck, a tiny figure, to emerge out of her nightmare.

  If you were to look at her, she looked half dead but she was completely alert. I know this because occasionally she would suddenly say something. She could hear me coming, as if she was straining her hearing above all of the sounds of the house, listening out for a foot to fall on our hearth, her footfall . . . but the only steps she heard were mine, and she’d yell out at me, ‘Stop shuffling.’ I knew she was comparing me to Beatrice, who walked on her toes, like a dancer. I was clumsy. This I could not help. But at the time, I felt it was a great failing. In fact, I felt I had let my mother down.

  Why could I not make her notice me?

  I had always thought that she loved Beatrice more than me, but now it became blatantly obvious. Every day she continued her vigil stung my heart. No one else would do but her Beatrice. Stupidly, I envied my sister: even when she had gone missing, she stole the limeight.

  My father disappeared too. He could not bear the atmosphere in the house, and was completely futile in his attempts to comfort Mammy. My daddy did not see me any more. And in a way that hurt more, as he retreated to the only sanctuary he knew, the pub; he anaesthetized his suffering. He forgot that I was suffering too, and that only he knew how to make me feel loved with the songs and the jokes and the tickling he had showered upon me when I was little.

  The family came: Aunt Bríd, Uncle Jack, Aunt Aoife and Aunt Mary. But none of them were able to rouse Mammy. In desperation they brought Father Cleary, but he could not reach her either. They were afraid to bring the doctor; they thought that Mammy might be taken away. And then who would mind me?

  Overnight I felt like an orphan, and there only seemed to be one person who really cared. Every day as I was coming home from school I held my breath in anticipation, jumping off the school bus and running to the door. I’d stop and listen. Sure enough, I’d hear Mrs Lynch inside, moving about with military precision. Then I could breathe a sigh of relief; there’d be something to eat, and there’d be someone to listen to me. There would be some semblance of normality. We would have probably all starved if it hadn’t been for Mrs Lynch.

  Every afternoon at three o’clock precisely she’d come over, give the house a shake and put on the dinner. Even though she had her own very large family to look after, somehow she managed to look after me as well. I think she left the eldest Lynch girls minding the little ones. These girls were the same age as me, but for some reason Mrs Lynch considered I needed minding too.

  She’s dead now. All those years she had cancer and she never told a soul.

  Saint Assumpta Lynch.

  Assumpta – isn’t that such a crazy name? But it suited Mrs Lynch. She was very religious, and I don’t just mean she went to church every day. She lived her religion. I would describe her as someone completely without artifice: pure and unblemished.

  Isn’t it strange that I remember Mrs Lynch so vividly, more than my own mother and father at that time? I remember her kind face, with the soft brown eyes, and her complexion: flushed cheeks and pale forehead. It looked as if she had scrubbed her face with a wire brush. She was so kind, always gently guiding Mammy: drink this, and a cup of tea would be put into her hand; eat that, and a plate of food would be placed on her lap; listen to this, and she’d put on the radio.

  It was Mrs Lynch who bought me my first pack of sanitary towels, and my first bra. It was Mrs Lynch who helped me find a dress for my ‘debs’ (our graduation dance at school). It was Mrs Lynch who drove me to Navan, to the county library, so I could take out books on art. Then we’d have a laugh looking at them together. Mrs Lynch used to slag the abstract expressionists – in particular Jackson Pollock – she said her little Johnny could do better with his eyes closed and a few pots of poster paint. But she didn’t mean anything by it. I think she liked talking to me about art.

  I painted her a picture once of the view from the village as you stand looking at Witch’s Hill. It wasn’t very good; in fact, the perspective was wrong. But she absolutely loved it. She framed it and put it up in her hall. I only discovered this on the day of her funeral when we all filed through the Lynches’ front hall. I remembered her when I had given her the picture. She had said nothing for a second, just stared at it. Mammy was in the room, stationed by the back door, but she didn’t turn or appear to notice what was going on.

  ‘Eithne, this is just great, darling. It’s beautiful. But don’t you want to give it to your mother?’

  It was Mother’s Day.

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. I did not care if Mammy heard. I was so angry with her then – she had never wanted my love. I knew this because she had always shown me very little, as if I was always in the way. If I wanted anything – a story or a song – she would always refer me to Daddy. It was like she willingly split the family: her and Beatrice on one side, and me and Daddy on the other.

  I was eighteen when Mrs Lynch died. I hadn’t even known she was sick. All I had heard was that she was going into hospital to have some tests. I was even planning to visit her the next day; I’d painted her a picture of some flowers specially. But she never came back – she was gone, just like that. The same thing all over again.

  I remember Mr Lynch came to our door. His face was ashen and he spoke in whispers to Daddy. I knew something terrible had happened, and I started to cry even before he said anything.

  Daddy came into the kitchen. ‘Assumpta Lynch died this morning, God love her,’ he said to Mammy’s back. ‘It was the cancer, awful quick.’

  I stood shaking, the tears spilling out of my eyes.

  ‘Eithne, are you all right?’ he asked, confused.

  ‘No! No! No!’ I screamed and sank to the floor. Mammy spun round, she stared at me incredulously. She was looking at me as if she had never seen me before. ‘Get her some brandy,’ she ordered Daddy hoarsely.

  Exactly three days after Mrs Lynch died, Mammy got up from her chair. It was raining and beating down so hard that she couldn’t see a thing out the window anyway. One of my art books was on the couch. She picked it up and leafed through it. It was about the Renaissance, and there were lots of paintings of angels, with beautiful hair in golden curls, singing. It seemed so lovely to her – all the colours – after five years of grey. I was in the bathroom when I heard Mammy crying. I hadn’t heard her cry since that day with Mrs Lynch, five years ago. Cautiously I entered the room.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mammy?’ I asked.

  She held up the book. ‘Do you think that she’s in heaven?’ she asked me, wiping her eyes with her hankie and looking like a child. ‘Do you think she’s an angel?’


  ‘Yes, Mammy,’ I said gently. ‘I think she watches over you.’

  ‘She’s never coming back, is she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Eithne . . . please forgive me.’

  Tears began to well in my eyes; I ran over and hugged her.

  ‘Mammy,’ I whispered.

  She pulled away, and kissed my cheek.

  ‘Will you tell me about the pictures?’ she asked me.

  So I did. I told her about the beginning of the Renaissance, and Giotto’s painted murals in Padua, I told her about the winding streets of Siena, and Duccio’s magnificent altarpiece, and then I spoke about Florence and the glory and splendour of that ancient city. As I spoke her face began to respond to the art I was describing, light began to fill her eyes again and her tears almost gleamed gold, reflecting the fragile rays of sun, which were breaking through the rain outside the window.

  ‘It sounds like such a beautiful place,’ she said. ‘I’d love to go there.’

  ‘Me too,’ I replied.

  ‘Then we will one day.’ She took my hand and squeezed it tight.

  And that was how my mother began to love me again. It was through art.

  THREE: THE BERET

  EITHNE

  It was a beret not a hat. I don’t know why they called it a hat. Possibly ‘beret’ was too foreign a word for the local Gardaí.

  ‘A pink hat decorated with beads,’ read the description.

  It was a cerise beret with stars on the top.

  Beatrice had returned with the beret when she went to the rock concert with Phil.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked her.

  ‘I swapped it,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘My waistcoat.’

  ‘That was my waistcoat!’

  ‘You gave it to me.’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Oh, well, we can share this.’

  She dumped the beret on my head.

  ‘Suits you,’ she said. ‘Look, it has stars on it.’ She whipped it off my head and threw it up into the air. Little diamanté beads sparkled in the sunlight.

  ‘It smells,’ I said.

  ‘This is the genuine hippy article,’ she said.

  We were standing in a sloping field a few miles from the village. Phil was there. We had gone on one of our ‘walks’ – empty summer-day rambles, which went in no particular direction and with no particular purpose. Beatrice and Phil had let me trail along behind them, although in fact they preferred to be alone.

  ‘You look stupid,’ I said.

  I was thirteen and really into fashion. I was wearing stretch drainpipe jeans, loafers, and a huge white frilly shirt. My hair was short and layered, with a side parting and a monstrous flick. Beatrice on the other hand let her hair roam wild; it was soft and curly. She was wearing a long dress from one of those ethnic shops. It was pale blue with paisley patterns. She had purple clogs on, and loads of bells and bracelets. She reeked of patchouli.

  ‘We don’t need to follow fashion,’ said Phil. ‘That’s for the masses. We are individuals, we create our own style.’

  He looked just as bad in flared purple jeans and an embroidered hessian shirt. His blond hair was curly and unkempt. Beatrice’s blue scarf was wound around his neck.

  The village regarded the pair with a mixture of confusion and horror. As we tramped along the lanes and byways of our locality, as we stomped through fields, farmers and local housewives would slow their cars down to a crawl and just stare as if they had seen an apparition. Beatrice delighted in this, Phil did not care and I felt humiliated.

  We had only known Phil a few weeks, although we had heard about him nearly all our lives. Phil is my Uncle Jack’s son. The son he had had to leave behind in England when he separated from his wife in the late sixties and came back to live in Ireland. For Jack this had been the single most traumatic event of his life – leaving his little boy behind – but he had had to back away gracefully. In those days paternal custody was unthinkable. Still, Uncle Jack had never forgotten his son – religiously sending him Christmas and birthday presents, visiting him every year (followed by a tearful, boozy return in the pub with my father) and finally managing to convince his estranged wife to let Phil come to Ireland in the summer of 1981. At that time, Phil was in between school and university, Beatrice between school and art college. Both cousins were poised on the precipice of life; they immediately hit it off.

  Phil and Beatrice had a lot in common: they were both outsiders; both lived with men who were not their real fathers. Phil had been sent to public school, reared to follow a serious profession and stifled by his step-father’s right-wing beliefs. Similarly, Beatrice felt constrained by our rural lifestyle, the narrow-mindedness of my father and the village. Both were champing at the bit, desperate for the freedom and independence of an adult life. Phil claimed he was going to be a musician (and he could play the guitar well), and, of course, Beatrice was going to be an artist. Together they would take off for Goa, Kathmandu, Marrakech . . .

  To me, they seemed totally out of date. While I was listening to Wham!, Funboy Three and Bananarama, Phil and Beatrice would play Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and old David Bowie songs.

  ‘Ziggy!’ Beatrice would screech in the middle of a sugar beet field, and the two of them would launch into a rendition of ‘Ziggy Stardust’, and all the songs from that album.

  I don’t know why I followed them around; I suppose it was boredom. The worst kind, when you’re thirteen. I did not have many friends, and the few I had lived too far away for a bicycle ride. Beatrice and Phil were my summer’s entertainment.

  The two of them had a powerful charisma: they shone, they glowed, they had so much spirit and vitality. They had so many dreams, and really believed that one day they would be famous. Although I was only thirteen, I had already resigned myself to a choice of three careers – a nurse, a secretary or a school teacher. These were the options presented to us through our school careers guidance. Beatrice was considered eccentric, but she was respected as a demanding and challenging student. She was special.

  And there was something else as well.

  Looking back I realize that Phil and Beatrice could have been in love. Nobody worked this one out – they were first cousins. Taboo. But Phil and Beatrice both knew they were not really cousins, not by blood. They played with each other – horsing around – and even with my inexpert eyes I sensed something more. There would be a still moment in the middle of the play fight, a look, a teasing movement.

  At that point I would turn on my heel and walk home by myself, feeling miserable, alone and ugly.

  The highlight of that summer was the concert at Slane Castle. Of course my father banned me from going and strictly speaking had not allowed Beatrice to go – he would not give her the money for a ticket – and he persuaded Jack not to give Phil the money either.

  The duo was undeterred. They picked raspberries for three weeks so they could each save enough money to buy a ticket.

  When the day of the concert arrived, Mammy was worried; she had heard there had been fights in Slane the night before.

  ‘They’ll all be gone now, Mammy. They probably didn’t have tickets anyway.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Kelly,’ said Phil. ‘I’ll take care of her for you.’

  My mother shook her head, but she would not stop them – any action which undermined my father she would allow, without him knowing of course.

  The two of them set out, hitching a lift in the back of Paddy O’Connor’s truck. It goes without saying that they looked a spectacle. Beatrice wore a floor-length flowered skirt, a clashing pink blouse, my embroidered waistcoat and the purple clogs. Phil had on his purple flares and an Afghan coat.

  ‘People’ll think I’m taking ye to the funny farm.’ Paddy O’Connor laughed. My father was down at the bog – just as well, he would have gone mad.

  Beatrice and Phil did not return until the next day, grass sticking ou
t of their hair, eyes dazed. The concert had been good, but even better had been their discovery – drugs.

  A bog isn’t just brown. I learnt this when studying the bogs at home. There is a kaleidoscope of colours – greens, greys, reds, deep purple, bluish black. One of my prints is called ‘Glenamona’ – the name of a bog at home. The paper is filled with all these colours – their dark, deep shades, which a bog feeds, nurtures and reveals. In this expanse there is a spot of pink. It sparkles – glitters in a hidden light. Everyone asks me, what is that? Is it a flower?

  No, it’s a hat. A cerise beret with stars on it.

  SARAH

  Sarah did not remember much about the first days of Beatrice’s life. Learning to breastfeed occupied the first twenty-four hours – the baby would not take the breast at first, and Sarah was afraid she would have to bottle feed. But eventually Beatrice learned to latch on. As the child sucked on her breast, Sarah’s womb contracted. It was painful, but oddly pleasurable. Night and day lost distinction: she slept when the baby slept. She had never felt so tired in her life.

  Anthony came to see her in hospital the day after Beatrice was born. He brought the most exquisite bouquet of flowers – irises, gypsophila and lilies. He was quiet, but the flush in his cheeks, the shine in his eyes betrayed his pride. To Sarah he seemed distant. The baby had just fallen asleep and she was dying for a nap.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ said Anthony.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. The baby stirred. ‘I’d let you hold her but she has just gone to sleep.’

  ‘That’s fine. She looks too delicate to be touched. Sarah, would you like me to tell Jonathan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Okay. Well . . . when are you getting out of here? Shall I pick you up?’