Another Kind of Life (25 page)

‘The next few weeks are going to be busy; very busy indeed.’

Hannah wondered what was going to keep everyone in Dublin so occupied, but still she said nothing. She knew that she would live in Holywood, a seaside town some four miles outside Belfast; that
Charles and his mother would find a suitable house to rent; that there would be a small, elegant wedding from home: family only. Why was her mother so convinced of her own busyness?

‘I wanted to have this time to speak to you before we . . . all of us . . . got . . . distracted.’

Hannah felt her face begin to colour. She didn’t want to believe it, but it seemed that her mother was going to speak to her about married life, about the things which passed between men
and women: the physical act of which she already had some confused knowledge, knowledge she had long ago dismissed in all its enormity and improbability. Girls in school had whispered to each other
about such things in the darkness of the dormitory. Giggling and snorting into pillows, the older ones had talked about men and women ‘cleaving unto one another’, becoming ‘one
flesh’, about a man ‘knowing’ a woman: their talk had shocked Hannah. She hadn’t wanted to know then, hadn’t wanted to listen. She felt the same now. She wanted to put
her hands over her ears, or disappear under the blankets like a child. She was afraid that her mother was going to spoil the first stirrings of romance which she had felt as she’d sat beside
Charles in his mother’s garden. Her first tentative thrillings of love were a world apart from the crude, knowing talk of schoolgirls. She was just becoming used to the feeling that her life
might be bearable after all, that she could do as her father and mother had bid her. If that feeling went away, if her mother did anything to spoil the tiny shoots of tenderness she was nurturing
for Charles, then she, Hannah, would no longer be able to endure it.

‘Please don’t, Mother.’

Strangely, her embarrassment seemed to make Sophia all the more determined to continue.

‘I cannot leave you ignorant, Hannah. I may have many failings as your mother, but I feel that this must be spoken of between us.’

Sophia’s voice was soft. For a moment, Hannah remembered how close they had once been, how her mother had trusted and confided in her, perhaps even needed her. She had a brief, blinding
memory of that train journey from Belfast to Dublin five years ago, feeling grown up, a true confidante, while May slept and Eleanor sucked her thumb for comfort. All that closeness was gone now,
destroyed by her father and mother’s usurping of her life. She wondered if it would ever be possible to forgive her, if the ties between them could ever be the same again.

‘I’m listening.’

Hannah sat across from her mother on the small padded chair beside her dressing table. She would obey, would give her outward compliance as she had learned to do over the last, painful few
months. Her voice and expression were deliberately cool, controlled. She waited. A word from her would take the chalky strain out of her mother’s face, would let the blood rush back to the
high, prominent cheekbones. But she would say nothing, for now. She felt almost elated by the sense of power she had over this woman. It was good – a kind of revenge. Sophia’s hands
were a waxy white, knuckles sharp and shiny, fingers now interlaced. Hannah noted, with increasing detachment, that they were trembling.

‘You will soon be a married woman.’

Here she smiled across at Hannah. She got no response.

‘What you need to understand, my dear, is that what happens between a man and a woman on their wedding night is part of God’s plan, but not knowing can make it
frightening.’

Hannah still didn’t speak. She kept her gaze steady, holding her mother’s reluctant grey eyes. It was Sophia who finally looked down at her hands.

‘When a man joins his body to a woman’s, it is warm and natural, and, for many people, it eventually becomes rather wonderful.’

Sophia looked straight at her daughter, and now Hannah wanted to look away. Her mother’s expression startled her into pity, and she did not want to feel that. She could see the chasm
between what her mother’s marriage had become and the hopes with which she must have started out as a young woman. Or had Sophia, too, been given no option? Had she also had her choices
constrained, her life shaped by the circumstances of social and family needs? Hannah felt suddenly terrified for herself – would she be speaking like this to her own daughter one day, with
more than twenty years’ accumulated disappointments and bitterness behind her? She had the sense that married love had never become ‘rather wonderful’ for her mother. Hannah
wanted to stop her, before this intimacy became any more painful. As it was, the air in the room was charged with emotion, her mother’s eyes were much too bright. Hannah did not want her to
cry; she couldn’t bear to comfort her.

‘Mama, I think I understand what happens, and I hope I will be prepared. Thank you for talking to me.’

Sophia heard ‘Mama’ and wanted to weep. Ever since she and Edward had brought her home from school on that dreadful day, Hannah had refused to call them ‘Papa’ or
‘Mama’. Instead, she had carefully articulated ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ with all the calculation and precision of an insult.

Sophia stood up slowly. She stretched out her hand and touched her daughter’s face briefly.

‘Just remember this, my dear – I’ve always tried to do my best.’

She left the room at once, closing the door gently behind her. Hannah didn’t even have time to say ‘goodnight’. The room seemed very empty after she had gone, and Hannah felt
an unaccountable sadness. She was edgy and restless for the rest of the evening. Everything around her irritated her. She felt hemmed in, claustrophobic. The gas lamp was burning smokily; it threw
strange shadows on her wall as she moved about the room. She pulled books off her shelves, leafing through them impatiently, but the light was too dim for reading. She found herself wanting answers
to questions she didn’t even know how to ask. Nothing gave her peace.

She wanted her sisters. But May wouldn’t be back from school until the weekend. Perhaps Eleanor would still be awake. The child had come to her so often in the past, snuggling down beside
her, in search of comfort. Now the tables had turned. Hannah opened her door as quietly as she could, and tiptoed up the three steps to the second landing. She tapped softly on her sister’s
door.

Now it was time for Eleanor to look after her.

T
HE
ENTIRE
HOUSEHOLD
was in an uproar for weeks. May and I might never have existed, for all the
attention anyone paid us. Mama had said that the wedding would be a small one, an intimate affair, for the immediate family only. I remember wondering how life could possibly be any more frantic
had the proposed party been a larger one.

I think Hannah was happy on her wedding day. She certainly appeared to be. I felt close to her again and, selfishly, that was all I cared about. She’d had time for me and interest in all
my doings over the past few months, even though every moment of hers was spoken for. It felt good to have her back. She and I never spoke of the day at the piano to anyone else – now that is
a secret shared among three of us: you, me and Hannah. After I had cried myself out, and feigning reluctance, had opened my bedroom door to her, I allowed her to embrace me. She had cried then,
too, and hugged me close, calling me ‘Mouse’, and promising that she would never hurt me again, that she was so ashamed of her bad temper, that I was the best sister in the world. Such
a reconciliation more than made up for the distance that had opened up between us since she had been taken out of school.

The afternoon of the piano stool seemed to break something in her. The following evening, she allowed Papa’s insistence to bring her out of her room once again, to join him and Mama in the
drawing room. I felt very sad for her that day. She still looked pale and unhappy, her eyes red-rimmed and sore-looking. She smiled a watery little smile at me as she made her way downstairs, and I
had the strangest sensation that something in her spirit had been dulled, some vital inner light had been quenched beyond repair.

I did not know then what had passed among the three of them, closeted once more together in the drawing room. Whatever it was, Hannah ceased to rebel openly, although she still appeared to me to
be restless, touchy, quick to anger. However she felt about Mama and Papa, she was quietly affectionate to me, which was all I wanted. I did wonder, though, why she never touched the piano, never
sang, never tried to make herself happy again. She was no longer locked in her room, and she was, on the surface at least, obedient to Mama and Papa. I think that was all that was expected of
her.

But once we had been to Belfast to meet Charles, she seemed to be more contented, more animated. I know that I was surprised, and, in my own childish way, filled with contradictory emotions. I
suppose, in my black and white view of the world, I was secretly disappointed. That she seemed happy again should have made me glad: but I was sorry that she hadn’t fought them all for
longer. Ever since that day in the MacBrides’ house when she and Charles had spoken together privately in the garden, she had become much more sober and sensible. I missed our silly songs,
and the plays the three of us used to perform together, starring as The Bright Brilliant Sisters of Belfast. We still called ourselves that, although of course we had had to alter the title some
six years previously in order to suit our return to Dublin. Ever afterwards, it ceased to have the same magic to it.

I remember promising myself that what had happened to Hannah would never happen to me. Her predicament had given me fair warning. I still had some years in which to prepare my escape. I would
not be married off to anyone. I intended to choose my own life.

In her own quiet way, May was equally determined. She wanted to travel, I’d always known that. Ever since we were children, she had wanted to go to Africa, to India, to the Americas. As we
got older, she longed to do the Grand Tour of Europe, as some of the girls from school had done. Italy, Germany, Switzerland all fascinated her. But she knew there was no point in hoping, no point
in wishing for anything so impossible. ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’ Mama reminded us of this on many occasions. There was no longer the prospect of money for even the
most modest ‘grand tour’ – indeed, if there had ever been. But May was determined – she would see Europe, or die in the attempt. Above all else, she longed to see France.
She had always been enchanted by picture books of castles, I remember, fascinated by a country which had kings and queens, style, history, romance. Dublin and Belfast made her feel suffocated. She
said they were too small, too stifling. They ate away at the spirit, like rust on the soul. She needed somewhere where living was on a larger scale, where there was room to breathe.

‘S
TAND
STILL,
H
ANNAH
, for goodness’ sake! I’m almost finished.’

Hannah held on tightly to the bedpost. Her mother stood behind her, pulling ever more firmly on the laces of her corset. Lily was standing by, holding a freshly ironed petticoat draped across
her outstretched arms. She held it the way one would carry a sleeping child, and something in her pose struck Hannah as almost unbearably sad. She had no idea how old Lily was – perhaps early
thirties, perhaps early forties; it was too hard to tell. Her face had been lined and ruddy ever since Hannah could remember, her hands coarse and callused. Even her hair seemed to have been grey
for ever. The way she waited, patiently, smiling encouragement at Hannah made the younger woman feel suddenly embarrassed. She saw how she must look to Lily – a beautiful young girl, with an
affluent husband-to-be, the prospect of ease and children, all the things which, by rights, Lily should have had, too. Instead, she, Lily, was standing in someone else’s house, serving in
someone else’s bedroom, holding on to the empty promise of someone else’s frilled and sagging petticoat.

‘That’s enough, Mama – I can hardly breathe!’

Sophia clucked and fussed around her eldest daughter. Lily slid the satin petticoat over Hannah’s head, smoothing its lacy edging.

‘Boots?’

Hannah nodded, and quickly realized that the question was not meant for her. Sophia replied, her whole body intent on what she was doing.

‘Yes – and fetch me the button-hook, Lily, please. We should be ready for the gown shortly.’

Hannah said nothing. This was how she had felt more and more over the past weeks – as if she were standing at the sidelines of her own life. Her mother had grown busier and busier, her
father more and more remote. Hannah had felt as though she were a nuisance, an impediment to the advancing march of her mother’s preparations. She would leave little to Lily and Katie: she
wanted to do it all herself. She was rarely absent from Hannah’s side, instructing her on how to stand, how to look, how to be. Hannah’s frustration grew until, one day, she could stand
it no longer, and openly lost patience with her mother.

‘Mama! Please! Leave me alone!’

On that occasion, Hannah had stormed up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door in temper, something she hadn’t done since she was a child. She had apologized, of course, hating and
resenting every moment of her mother’s martyred air. She still didn’t know which was worse – Mama’s over-eagerness to get everything just right, or Papa’s air of
complete detachment.

Papa had barely spoken to Hannah once the engagement had been announced. It was as though he washed his hands of her; she was no longer his responsibility. Now he had other things to occupy him.
But Mama had thrown herself into the wedding preparations with all the energy she could muster. It was as though someone had thrown her a lifeline: now she could be useful again, could arrange the
perfect wedding, could see people’s admiring glances and feel perhaps a small return of the old glory.