1999 (36 page)

 

Escape. The word haunted Ursula.
Escape. They did the impossible, they escaped. They were not willing to serve out their sentences in prison. How did Barry describe the cells in the Blocks? Six paces by six paces? Not much smaller than my room here.

My life here.

 

“I want to go home,” said Ursula.

Barry frowned. “What are you talking about, Ursula? You are home.”

“Your home. My home is in Clare.”

The conversation was taking place early in the morning when Barry stopped by her room, as he often did, on his way out. She was sitting up in bed with a cardigan slung around her shoulders and her hair still unbrushed. Pillow creases lined her cheek. “Next May it will be ten years since Talbot Street,” she said. “It's high time I went home.”

Barry put down the holdall he was carrying. He was used to Barbara ambushing him on his way out but Ursula had never done so before. “I don't understand what you're talking about.”

“You've been wonderful,” she said. “You've done everything you possibly could for me. But this isn't
my life,
Barry, can you understand? This is
your
life. I need to have my own again before it's too late, and that means going back to the farm.”

Barry was worried.
Does she know something she's not telling anyone? Is that sixth sense of hers warning her?

“Mother,” he said—choosing the unfamiliar title deliberately—“you couldn't possibly live on your own at the farm.”

“I shall employ a companion.” The set of her features told him the matter was already decided.

He progressed from worry to alarm. “There are too many practical problems to even consider it. If you're homesick for Clare I can certainly understand, but…”

“I've already spoken with Paul Morrissey on the phone and told him I was moving home. He will have everything ready for me by the time I arrive. The farm is turning enough profit to support me, so I won't need any help in that respect. I can even install one of those mechanical lift gadgets to take me up and down the stairs in the wheelchair. There are good doctors in Ennis and a good hospital too, so that's covered. I hope you will all come to see me often. And be happy for me?” she added hopefully.

Barry sat down on the foot of the bed. “You're really serious about this, aren't you?”

“I am serious.”

His churning brain tried to come up with an argument she would accept. “But what about your grandchildren?”

“I love them to bits and shall miss them very much, but they're going to have their lives to live too. Bring them every time you come down, so Trot can learn the horse business. They will love visiting their Nana on the farm because it will be different, and much nicer than paying duty visits to an old woman living in a room that smells like an old woman.”

“You don't spend all your time in here. You go all over the house, you even go out.”

“Within limits,” said Ursula.

“You can go wherever you want to.”

“Fine. I want to go to Clare.”

Barry postponed his drive to Belfast and went to talk to Barbara.

Alone in her room, Ursula dressed herself with the clothes Breda had laid out for her the night before, and got into her wheelchair. She sat at the window, gazing out. Seeing a different landscape.

The light in the morning is so beautiful at home. Atlantic light. I love the sound of horses chewing their grain in the barn, and the smell of the hay. Even if I never walk again I want to look out of my own windows and see the green fields waiting for my feet.

Even if I never walk again.

Ten years. Everyone thinks it's hopeless by this time. Maybe it is. But I'm certain it's hopeless if I stay here where nothing more is expected of me.

Looking out at the streets of Dublin, she saw the rolling hills of Clare.

I have to go home.

 

“What did you do that put this notion into her head?” Barry demanded of his wife.

“Nothing. I didn't know anything about it until this minute.”

“You must have upset her somehow. I know you two aren't the best of friends, but…”

Barbara resented the accusation. “Everything that goes wrong around here is not my fault! Maybe Ursula just wants to go home.”

“You'd like that, wouldn't you?”

“I…I honestly don't know. I'm used to her. And there are times when we like each other. You're right, we'll never be the best of friends, but that's just how it is. She's your mother and she's welcome to stay here for as long as she wants.”

“That's the problem,” Barry said. “She doesn't want.”

He went back to Ursula's room for another conversation.

He found her sitting in her wheelchair with the blanket over her lap, staring out the window. For a moment she seemed unaware of him.

“Mother?”

That unfamiliar word again. She turned towards him. “What is it?”

“I was thinking about a companion for you, in case you do go to Clare. Plenty of people are looking for work. If we take our time and don't rush into this, maybe we can find a strong young woman here in Dublin who will…”

“There's no ‘in case' about it,” she replied with asperity. “And I don't want a high-strung young thing, I want Breda Cunningham. She's low-strung and we get along. I've already spoken to her about it. Her family's scattered to the four winds and she thinks she would like to live down the country. She was born on a farm, did you know that?”

“When did you discuss this with Breda?”

“Yesterday.”

Barry was irked that he had not been the first to know. “And Séamus, I suppose you told him too?”

“Not yet.” In truth she was not eager to tell McCoy she was leaving. Of them all, he was the one she would miss most.

Sensing her reluctance, Barry thought,
That might be the solution. She and Séamus are very close, maybe he can persuade her to stay.

He found McCoy mending a broken shutter. “Go talk to my mother, Séamus.”

“Right now? What about?”

“A certain decision she's made. I hope to God you can talk her out of it.”

Puzzled, McCoy put his hammer aside and went to Ursula's room. When he knocked at the open door she knew at once who had sent him, and why.
I'm not ready for this,
she thought, steeling herself.

She tried to sound very casual as she outlined her plans to McCoy. He was seriously taken aback, but knew her too well to try to argue. She was like her son once her mind was made up. “Breda's going with you?”

“She is.”

“Why not take me instead?”

Ursula could not help smiling. “You know yourself, Séamus; in this country unmarried women don't have unmarried men as nurse-companions.”

He had rehearsed the request that sprang to his lips a hundred times, but never found the perfect moment. This was certainly not perfect; too rushed, too fraught, not good enough by half for Ursula Halloran, who deserved champagne and roses. Yet, “Marry me!” he blurted.

She blinked; recovered. “That's very gallant of you, Séamus, but it's really not necessary. Breda and I will do just fine, and there is a shower of big strong Morrissey men across the fields if I need them.”

“I'm not trying to be gallant, I mean it. I want to marry you.”

She searched his face. That dear face she knew so well.

He did mean it. His whole soul was in his eyes.

Keeping her own face rigidly impassive, Ursula began struggling to move her legs beneath the concealing blanket. Her feet. Just one toe. Only yesterday there had been a tingle…or maybe that was the day before. Or maybe it was only wishful thinking.

Move, will you. Move! If ever I'm going to have a miracle let it be now.

McCoy was terrified by his own audacity.
Under fire,
he thought,
a man can find courage he never knew he had.

Time seemed to stop. Tiny beads of perspiration formed on Ursula's forehead.

If it's that hard for her to make a decision, maybe I'm in with a chance.

Ursula felt her life balanced on a knife edge as it had been almost ten years ago, when she turned towards Talbot Street instead of going on to Clerys. Then she did not know what might lie ahead; now she did.

With all the willpower she possessed she made one final, desperate effort.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

She gave McCoy her most radiant smile. “I am far too fond of you, Séamus, to lumber you with a broken wreck like me. Besides, you're a city man, you would be lost in deep country where the nights are silent and the stars are close enough to touch. Stay here with Barry, he needs you.”

She continued to hold the smile as if it did not hurt. Hurt terribly.

 

“I did everything I could,” McCoy duly reported to Barry, “but your mother's determined. Maybe I even made it worse.”

“Rubbish. But thanks for trying anyway. You know, if this had happened six or seven years ago I wouldn't have been so surprised. But when she made no effort to leave I thought it was because of the children—or because she wanted to stay close to the doctors who knew her case. What do you suppose triggered it now?”

 

In November the first formal meeting between the prime ministers of Ireland and Britain took place at Chequers, the country residence of the British head of state. After promising to help Ursula move to Clare as soon as he returned, Barry flew to England to photograph Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher. When the two appeared together after their meeting their body language indicated that matters were improving between their respective governments.

Upon returning to Ireland FitzGerald claimed that Thatcher had accepted his analysis of the Northern Ireland situation. He further announced that his proposals for the future government of the province would be presented to cabinet for approval, and then sent to the British.

 

“He's going to learn the hard way,” was the unanimous opinion of the Usual Suspects.

 

On the thirteenth of November Gerry Adams, MP for West Belfast, was elected president of Sinn Féin at the annual Ard Fheis.

 

Barry insisted that his mother have a full-scale checkup before returning to Clare, and get the doctors' approval for the undertaking—if possible. “Even if they say no I'm going,” she assured him.

“I know that. But do it for me, will you?”

 

Sitting beside him in the familiar passenger's seat of Apollo, with her wheelchair crammed into the boot, Ursula watched the Dublin streets glide past. There had been a time when she would have said she loved her birthplace.

Now she just wanted to leave and never see it again.

Talbot Street, Talbot Street. How long does one have to live to forget the worst nightmare?

The waiting room at the hospital was full, as usual. A nursing sister regretfully informed Barry that it might be an hour or more before the consultant could see them. “I'll be all right,” Ursula told him. “Why don't you…”

“Go get the newspapers,” he finished for her.

“You've been with Barbara too long, you're beginning to interrupt the way she does.”

As Barry left the waiting room an old woman sitting to Ursula's left leaned forward. “He's a big 'un, ain't he?” The accent was northside Dublin.

“My son,” Ursula said proudly.

“You must've fed him good.”

Ursula turned to look at her. The woman was at least ten years older than herself, with skin as wrinkled as crumpled newspaper. Poverty was written in every line, but her face was alight with the typical Dublin desire to talk.

“We were lucky,” Ursula replied. “My son grew up on a farm where we had enough to eat.”

The other grinned, revealing a scant snaggle of yellow teeth clinging to her upper gums like stalactites in a cave. “You was lucky, missus. When I was a young wan we lived in Railway Street and slept ten in a bed, so we did. The only protection the women in the tenements had to keep from having more children was to not sleep with their husbands. Every evening, rain, hail, or blow, they'd gather in the doorways wrapped up in their shawls and talk. Talk about the weather, yer wan up the street, yer wan down the street, the young wans—anything. Anything to keep them occupied until the children came down to say ‘The Da's asleep.' Then the women'd head upstairs to their beds.”

“That was a hard life,” Ursula commented. Dimly remembering.

“Mountjoy Square was not far from us,” the old woman went on, warming to her topic. “That's where the rich people lived. English people and want-to-be English people and the like. They had poor Irish girls living in their attics to do the housework. More often than not a son of the family would give one of them girls a big belly. The poor crayture would give birth in the attic, and then a closed carriage would come driving down Gardiner Street and her ladyship would lean out the window and beckon to the women sitting in the doorways. ‘Will you take a baby?' she'd say.

“Mammy never took one, she said she had too many already. But other women did. They'd take the poor thing because they knew a bit o'money came with it. Some even got money all the years the child was growing up. Lots of tenement children were reared with brothers and sisters who wasn't really their brothers and sisters but it never made no difference. There was always a new baby squalling and they just took it for granted.

“Sometimes when they got older they'd notice that ‘brother' had a different look to his face than the rest of the family, or different coloured eyes, or…like you, missus, a fine set of white teeth like you never saw in the mouth of a child of the tenements.” She shook her head, bemused by memories. “Will you take a baby, missus?” she murmured again.

Ursula sat as if turned to stone.

 

“The doctors see no obstacle to her going back to the farm,” Barry reported when they got home. “After all this time her condition's considered stable, and she won't be alone. So I guess we'll have to let her go. She's made up about it, of course. At least I think she is. With Ursula you can never be sure. She's been awfully quiet since we left the hospital.”