Eden Burning (19 page)

“There’s more to life than getting good grades.” Cedric scraped the prawn cocktail glass clean and continued scraping.

“What would that be now?” Jenny laughed and sat back in the chair. “We’re back to those dreams again, aren’t we?”

• • •

Later that evening, as Margaret lay in bed listening to the rioting on Etna Drive, she didn’t know that she was living her last forty eight hours. She would continue to watch the minute hand of the clock move forward slowly until day break. That’s what she did every night. Only when the sun rose over Belfast Harbour did she eventually fall into a deep, heavy sleep for an hour or two before breakfast.

chapter 6

Wednesday 5th January 1972

I
n 18, Elmwood Terrace Peter pulled a chair up to the breakfast table.

“What have you got on today?” Eileen asked sipping on her tea, passing a slice of toasted wheaten to Peter.

“History, English, Biology and Chemistry.”

“That’s a busy day.” Eileen filled Peter’s mug with tea. “You’ll have Mr McCabe today for History and English?”

“Yes. Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course you can. What is it?” Eileen lowered her voice.

“Did you love Dad when you married him?”

Eileen pulled her chair closer to the table. She cradled the cup of tea in both hands. She looked into the teacup before raising her eyes to look at Peter.

“That is a question I wasn’t expecting. What makes you ask?”

“I’ve wondered for a long time why you married him.”

Eileen looked away from Peter through the window into the darkness outside.

“I don’t think I loved him.”

“Why did you marry him then?”

“I was young. I didn’t know what love was about. He was quite a bit older than me – thirteen years. I was only sixteen when we met. William worked in the Royal Victoria Hospital. I met him when my mother was in hospital. My father died when I was four. When mother died in 1939, the only family I had left was Uncle Roy. I moved in to live with him. He was a kind man but it wasn’t the same as having mother alive. With mother I could sit with her in silence – neither of us saying a word – and I felt deeply happy. With Uncle Roy when we sat in silence, I only felt an enormous loneliness. When we looked into each other’s eyes it was as though the ghost of mother was seen by us both. We couldn’t see each other; only feel the pain of memory of the person we had both loved and lost. The war had started and William stayed in touch and seemed strong, as though he knew what to do with his life. He knew his own mind. He had been kind to my mother during those last months. I didn’t forget that. I felt protected, safe. He asked if I would go out with him. I said yes.”

“You said that you didn’t think that you loved him. What did you feel for him?”

“It was a kind of neediness. I needed someone to fill the gap left by mother’s death. I knew in the week before we were married that I shouldn’t marry him.”

“What happened? Why did you marry him then?”

“The week before we were due to be married, I spent three days thinking about how I could tell William that I didn’t want to marry him. I wanted to call the wedding off. It was a Wednesday evening. He was due to visit and take me to the Plaza. I didn’t bother getting dressed up or putting on any make up. I had decided that as soon as he knocked on the door, I would
invite him in for a cup of tea and tell him that the wedding was off. That night, he arrived early. He wasn’t dressed for going out dancing either. He was still wearing his hospital clothes. He told me he had to work late. He described how injured soldiers had been brought home and how he had worked a fourteen hour day helping re-arrange the beds and cleaning two storage rooms to make room for new beds. He came into the kitchen and kissed me on the cheek. It was a different kind of kiss – soft, gentle, not rushed. I stepped back in surprise and watched him limp from the kitchen into the sitting room. Seeing him, I felt a new, different emotion, a kind of painful sweet sadness. It seemed that his kiss sealed our destiny together. It awakened something which meant that I could never leave him, even if it wasn’t love. We were meant to be together. It was fate. It was as though he had read my mind. He sat on the sofa in the sitting room drinking tea. He said, “You know Eileen, I’ve never known what it is to love anyone. I think you should know that. I don’t think anyone has ever loved me. I don’t think even God loves me. I don’t think anyone could love me. I understand if you want to call the whole wedding off. I’m not good enough for you.”

“Are you saying that you don’t love me William?”

“I’m saying that I don’t know what love is. I would like to take care of you but I don’t think that is good enough for you. You can do better than that. You can find someone who knows what love is and who knows how to love you.”

“That was when I should have said yes, he was right, and that the wedding was off. I didn’t. I remembered his kiss. I felt that I wanted to learn how to love William. I thought that it was sad to live and never to have known that you’re loved or never been able to love. I thought that I could be the person who could help him to know what love was, given time. I could learn how
to love him and learn how to be loved by him. I told him nobody is perfect.” Eileen laughed. “When I look back now, I don’t feel that I made the decision to marry your father because I loved him, it was more that I knew that I couldn’t leave him.”

“Wouldn’t you want to leave him now? You could meet someone who would be more like you and who would appreciate you.”

“If I made a mistake in marrying your father Peter, I could do it again. No. I learnt to trust something else inside, something much more dependable. Knowing that my thoughts and feelings were so uncertain, unstable and unpredictable, I found something else inside which guided me and continues to guide me. I don’t need anyone. Not you, not your father or Cedric, or any other man, to be happy and to find peace.”

“What is it that you found to guide you?”

“I can’t really describe it. It’s like finding a way of listening to your heart rather than to your head. As I said I learnt not to trust my thoughts or feelings. I knew instead how to listen to my heart. Everybody eventually has to find out how to do that. No-one can teach you. It’s not easy because the heart speaks in a soft voice. The head has a much brasher voice that bullies you into doing what it wants. The heart whispers to you. It’s more like a kitten turning over on its back and allowing you to stroke its tummy. It doesn’t force you. It gently opens you up to see what you need to see. I found that it led me to a peace that I never expected.”

Peter wiped crumbs away from his lips. “I still don’t know what you mean? How can I do that?”

“I don’t know either Peter. If I knew, I would tell you. I would want you to know.”

As Peter closed the door of 18, Elmwood Terrace, the sky billowed with grey clouds tinged with orange, threatening a
fresh fall of snow. The day had an ancient feel to it as though Peter was stepping into a Turner or a Constable painting. Temperatures had fallen below zero. The cold wind now carried small hailstones that hit Peter on the face. He buried his chin into his woollen scarf, wishing he had remembered to wear a hat. He hummed Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’, trying to remember Rose’s face, imagining what she would be doing right now. Would she also be walking to school? A dog barked in a backyard – a hollow repetitive bark which followed him all the way to the school gate.

• • •

At eleven thirty on the morning of 5th January as Peter moved into his History class with Mr McCabe, Ciaran gave orders for Margaret Mulvenna to be murdered.

“Can I have a word?” Peter asked Mr McCabe at the end of the History class as the rest of the class filed along the corridor to Geography.

“Of course dear boy, do sit down.”

Mr McCabe waved at a chair behind the first row of desks. Peter sat down and leant forward, holding his head in his hands. He raised his head and stared into Mr McCabe’s grey eyes.

“Mr McCabe, do you think it is possible for people to change their mind, if they have strong opinions or a strong desire to do something? Is there evidence in history of people changing for the better?”

Mr McCabe buttoned up his waistcoat and perched on the edge of the table at the front of the room and rested his hands on his thighs.

“Well ‘for the better’ is perhaps difficult to define. What one person perceives as being ‘better’ may not be the same for another. However, if we look at Saul on the road to Damascus,
he is an interesting example of what perhaps you are asking about. He persecuted Christians and then became one of their strongest advocates. History is full of examples of people who dramatically changed their perspective and then acted differently and changed the world.”

“What would make someone change their mind, their way of seeing?” Peter leant back in the chair, pulling on his left ear lobe.

Mr McCabe stood up and pulled a second chair from behind the desk to sit side by side with Peter. He took a deep breath.

“Let’s look at the process of forming a perspective or opinion.”

Mr McCabe walked to the blackboard and quickly drew a flow chart, scraping the chalk across the board to form four boxes. He then drew five arrows at the top of the blackboard pointing into the first box, an arrow pointing to a second empty box, another arrow pointing to a third empty box and a final arrow pointing to a box at the bottom into which he wrote the word ‘actions’. He drew two lines out from this box – one to the right where he wrote ‘what we say’ and a line to left where he wrote ‘what we do’.

“It’s as simple and as complicated as this. What we say and do is our activity in the world. We can change what we say and do, but we need to understand the process of learning. What happens before you say or do anything?”

Peter thought for a moment. “I’m not sure.”

“What was happening before you answered?”

“I was thinking about your question.”

“Wonderful.” Mr McCabe wrote ‘thinking’ in the box above ‘actions’.

“What happens before you think?”

“I’m trying to make sense of the question. Is that not still thinking?”

“Let’s imagine that you are lying in bed. You hear a loud noise in your bedroom which wakens you from your sleep. What happens?”

“I wonder what the noise is.”

“That’s right. What else?”

“I wonder what I should do. Should I get out of bed or not to investigate?”

“That’s still thinking isn’t it?”

“Yes. What might make you get out of bed?”

“I might feel curious or afraid.”

“Absolutely. Emotions tend to be triggered before conscious thinking. There are exceptions to this but for now let’s keep it simple.”

Mr McCabe wrote the words ‘emotion/feeling’ in the box above ‘thinking’.

“We’ve only one box left. What happens before you have an emotional reaction to anything – for example before you experience fear, interest, confusion or humour?”

“Well, if I think back to the bedroom and hearing the loud noise, I’m trying to work out what the noise is, my brain is trying to understand it. Has a balloon burst or is it a gunshot? Is it in the house or outside?”

“Exactly. Let’s call that an unconscious struggle for perception or understanding of the world. It is a type of unconscious thinking. The brain is trying to make connections between what you already know and what is happening now. The five lines up here represent the five sense gates – hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, seeing – your brain is mapping over in less than a second what you are experiencing with what you already know. All learning is about changing this unconscious pattern, which will bring with it an emotional reaction, triggering new thinking and bringing new actions.”

Mr McCabe returned to his chair, still holding the chalk in his hand.

“There, dear boy, on that blackboard is the answer to your question and much more. In that simple flow chart is a pointer towards enlightenment and wisdom. Einstein said, ‘Take things to their simplest and no simpler’. The external trigger of the senses activates this process which is completed in less than a trillionth of a second. Internal thoughts can be considered as external sound and they also trigger emotional reactions. Yet we are capable of changing our response. We can learn. We can make the process more complex and interesting. Buddhists would say that none of this really happens in a linear way such as I have described but is more a simultaneous arising and collapsing moment by moment. We can search out parallels in quantum physics or we can look at the work of the great philosophers – Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein – but I have found it most helpful to simplify and to work with what we can observe and change. We can observe our emotions and our thoughts. We can change what we say and do. We don’t have to be driven by what we experience if we can develop the skills of being able to observe our experience, being able to stay with what we are observing – concentration and equanimity.”

“What do you mean by equanimity?”

“An unconditional acceptance of whatever is happening – a matter-of -factness or a detachment in seeing what is – neither liking or disliking what is and therefore not pushing it away nor trying to hold onto it. The Greeks called it ‘apatheia’, which is not the same as apathy. It’s a kind of ‘hands off’ loving attention. In Ignatian Spirituality it is called ‘indifference’. You don’t care what you do – only that you can discern God’s will and do it.”

Peter sat upright in the chair,

“What happens if you have someone like Hitler? Do you let him murder? Do you try to stop him?”

“You act. Apatheia doesn’t mean that you are passive. You act but without being driven. You act from what you see. You are not violent.”

“What might you do?”

“You might say something to help them change. You might do something. Maybe you say or do nothing. I can’t be prescriptive. It depends.”

How do you help him change?”

“People change because they want to change – or because the scales fall from their eyes.”

Peter examined the flowchart scrawled on the blackboard. He leant forward in his chair. “If a person has strong emotions, it could be difficult to change their thinking.”