The Rising of Bella Casey (11 page)

Even then, he only half-believed but he nodded his assent.

‘There,’ Bella said, casting a victorious look in Ma’s
direction
, ‘that’s more like it.’

‘We should be off …’ the Bugler said.

‘He can’t go looking like that,’ his mother said, ‘look at the state of his hair.’

‘Like the quills of the fretful porcupine,’ Bella said.
Hamlet
, he recognised now, though not at the time, when no one
understood
, particularly not the Bugler. Even at ten he read better than his brother-in-law who could manage the newspaper but only with his lips moving. A clean collar was fetched. Then his mother took out a brush and attacked his hair.

‘Stand still, would you?’ his Ma said as he squirmed and let out a yelp. ‘I hope, Bella, you’ll be able to keep him in check on the train.’

‘Nick will hold his hand, won’t you, Nick?’

‘Only if he’s a good boy,’ the Bugler said. ‘All I can say is that he’s the fortunate fellow to have a sister like you, Bel.’

Bel. That was not her name. Her name was Bella. Beautiful bees, eloquent elles. Bel was hard and sharp and flat. Dolorous as the call of church or schoolyard. Overnight, the Bugler had
stripped her name of music.

When they got to the station, the Bugler peered through the porthole of the ticket office and slid the coins into the scooped hollow set into the wood like the bowl of a silver spoon. The clerk peered over his spectacles and spotting him said. ‘And will you, young fella, be following your Da into the colours?’

But he’s not my Da, he was about to say, when Bella did not put the clerk right. He felt tears brimming.
I will not cry, I will not cry.

The Bugler palmed the tickets and led them down on to the platform.

‘Which carriage?’ the Bugler asked. But he would not play
that
game. He would not be diverted from his pain.

No sooner were they settled in, than the train gave a
terrific
lurch and let out a dry squealing retch. The carriage
juddered
catching them all unawares, throwing the Bugler and Bella together. The Bugler nuzzled into Bella’s neck.

‘And how’s my little wifey?’ he whispered.

‘Give over, Nick,’ she said, ‘not in front of the child.’ As if he couldn’t see, as if his being there made no difference at all. The Bugler sighed extravagantly and leaned back against the seat, holding Bella’s hand firmly in his lap. As if he owned her.

‘Look,’ Bella said when they reached Booterstown, ‘at the birds wheeling over the marsh.’ But he only saw flecks of smut,
tossed about by the wind.

‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to come.’

She stretched out her hand to touch his cheek, but he drew back. If she touched him again, he would surely bawl.

‘Oh let him be, Bel,’ the Bugler said. ‘There’s no pleasing him.’

When they arrived at the beach, he wandered away almost at once while the Bugler and Bella sat on a bench on the promenade. He would not be a witness to any more of their canoodling, Nick whispering in her ear or pressing his hand on her thigh. The tide was almost as far out as England. He sloshed through puddles. His boots were letting in and he could feel the damp seeping into his soles. It was too cold to go paddling barefoot as Bella had promised. And there were no donkey rides either.

‘Oh,’ she lamented, ‘it’s out of season.’

Her every promise dwindled into falsity.

He stood on the dappled shore, with the seagulls crying out their grievances and even the sea seemingly withdrawing from him and felt solitary and disowned. The courting couple were like distant smudges on the promenade but no matter how far he travelled he couldn’t create enough distance to reduce them to nothing. He squatted by some rocks and felt low, as beadily evil as the slimy ochre wrack at his feet. A crab scuttled from its hiding place, cocky in its ox-blood armour.
He saw red. He reached for a large flat stone, smooth and silvered, and so heavy it took two hands to lift it. He raised it high, and brought it down. Once, twice. He heard the crack of the creature’s carapace and the sudden collapse of its claws.

‘That’s for you, Bugler Beaver!’ he muttered. ‘Damn you!’

The oath satisfied him.

When he lifted his eyes, a shadow had fallen between him and the weakling sun. He shielded his eyes with his hand to escape the glare and in the dark cave his fingers made he could see that it was Bella. Had she heard? He didn’t care.

‘Come along now,’ she said and offered him her hand. But he wouldn’t take it.

The next day the Bugler was gone, posted with his regiment to Aldershot.

A week after her wedding, the little gate of Hawthorn Terrace squealed, serving as a herald of Bella’s approach.

‘What is it now?’ Ma muttered to herself as she went to the door.

That was the way of it once Bella had taken up with the Bugler, her every appearance was twinned with trouble. Bella brushed past his mother and made her way into the front room, sinking gratefully into the sofa. She moved heavily these days as if she were carrying the weight of the world. It was only when she was with Nick –
her Nick
, how her lips pressed on the possessive – that she was gay, as if she had found with
him the girl she had never been.

‘What is it, Bella? What?’ Ma repeated, all panicky.

‘I was called in by the Reverend Leeper,’ Bella began.

‘What has he done to you?’ his mother demanded.

Bella hesitated, bit her lip.

‘What in God’s name is it?’

‘There was a meeting of the Guardians. The Reverend led the charge, berating me for my ‘atrocious’ record-keeping, my ‘waywardness’ with fees pending, my ‘flagrant shortcomings’ in discipline. As if it were a court martial. He made me stand the whole time, despite my encumbrance.’

Encumbrance – he pondered on these words.

‘He said I was unfit, morally unfit to teach. Stamp that on her papers, he said.’

‘So they have let you go?’

Bella nodded miserably.

‘Didn’t I tell you,’ Ma said, ‘that you’d sup sorrow the day you took up with that Beaver?’

He was sent to help Bella fetch her things on her last day at the school. He knew his way around; he’d spent two years in this room looking up to her. Now he felt quite the big boy marching down the backstairs and into the basement hallway outside the schoolroom door. But there was no one to lord it over – Bella’s infants had been released for the last time and she was dolefully moving around the room righting the slates
and gathering the chalk.

‘Oh,’ she said looking up finally after he’d been standing there for several minutes. He liked to watch her and her unknowing; it was the only way these days he could steal a march on the bloody Bugler. ‘It’s you.’

She hazarded a weak smile. For the first time in his life he felt pity for her, though he didn’t know why. Pity sits uneasily in a child and he railed against it.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

‘Gather those books on my desk and I’ll fetch a box for you to stow them in,’ she said.

She went to the teacher’s press, fishing out the key from her school ma’am’s skirts and lodging it in the cupboard’s scrolled escutcheon. Suddenly there was a commotion upstairs.

‘Did you leave the street door open?’ she demanded.

She made for the stairs but she had to fall back. Two men in caps were on their way down, manoeuvring a harmonium. The reverend was hovering behind them issuing directions.

‘Keep it straight, now, men. Easy now, easy. Be gentle with her.’

Bella had to press herself against the wall to let them pass as they man-handled the instrument through the doorway of the schoolroom.

‘Gift of Miss Eliza Griffin and the ladies of Zion Road,’ the reverend said to Bella. ‘Our Miss Blennerhassett has come with a dowry!’

‘Miss Blennerhassett?’ Bella asked.

‘Our new teacher, Mrs Beaver!’ he said. ‘Your replacement.’

Bella stared after him. Once the men were inside, the
reverend
shut the schoolroom door with a resounding thud.

‘You see how it is for me, Jack,’ she said. ‘Banished from the garden.’

The first he knew about the baby was when Doctor Sloper was called. When the birth pangs started. There was an awful flurry to summon him a full three weeks early.

‘So much for the teacher’s calculations,’ his Ma said.

‘That’s Nature for you,’ the doctor replied. ‘The apple decides when it will fall from the tree.’

Still he didn’t understand. He thought Bella just plain sick. He sneaked into his mother’s room and lodged himself under the bed. This was where he retreated when there was too much female commotion. It was darkly soothing under there, away from the glare of light and the blare of rows. But within moments, that was where Bella was led, doctor on one side, his mother on the other, and he found himself trapped, unseen witness to Bella’s undoing. He lay on the floor, transfixed, watching the mattress ticking bulge and writhe over his head. The springs protested. The bed frame seemed to cringe. He tried to gag himself when Bella hollered and groaned. Over and over she cried out, pleading, beseeching, one name on her lips.
Nick, Nick, Nick
. It was as if murder were afoot, as if she
was at the wrong end of a terrible beating. His mother was in and out, flustered and full of grievance.

‘The cheek of that medic charging a fee,’ she complained when there was a break in hostilities, ‘when I’m doing most of the work, running here and yon boiling India rubber gloves not once but twice over, as if the place was a sty!’

‘It’s the modern way, Mother,’ he heard Bella say wearily but with a hint of admonition. ‘Better than depending on a nosey old handywoman with a so-called lucky hand.’

He was relieved. That sounded more like the old Bella. But then the assault resumed. He clapped his hands over his ears as Bella wept and railed. Later, much later, he would wonder if Bella had spent the rage of a lifetime in that one long afternoon.

‘Come on, Mrs Beaver, push,’ Dr Sloper urged. ‘It’s crowning.’

As if a coronation were in progress. From under the bed, he couldn’t work out what side the doctor was on. Was he with the assailants or agin them? And what was his mother doing, standing idly by? He would show them! But just as he was about to make himself known, a new cry joined the fray. Thin, feline, maligned. The doctor rushed from the room
bearing
the cry away – was he a ventriloquist? – with his mother following hot on his heels. He could see the pattern of their feet beneath the satin hem of the blankets. Gingerly he edged out from his cave, then knelt, peering up over the parapet of the high-built bed. Bella lay there, head averted, eyes closed,
her hair a matted nest. Her nightie had been rent above. Her breast showed, cupped in lace trim. The shift’s nether end was swaddled round her thighs; the sheets were bloodied. What had they done to her? He backed away from the bed. Oh Bella! Was she dead? He felt the weight of every mean thought he had held against her, as if his thoughts had had the power to kill. At the threshold he reversed into his mother, bustling her way in.

‘Where have you been?’ she demanded, thinking he had come in from the street. ‘Run along now, there’s nothing here a boy should see.’

‘Is Bella alright?’ he asked, heart in his mouth.

‘Bella,’ she said, ‘has made her bed.’

‘Is she dead?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, child, of course she’s not dead. She’s just had a baby, is all.’

The first he knew.

Baby Susan was a full three months old before the Bugler got his furlough. Bella was determined to meet him off the HMS
Violet
due at the North Wall.

‘His first sight of home should be his wife and child,’ she declared.

‘Can I come?’ he asked.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ Bella said, ‘not if you’re going to behave the way you did in Bray, all sullen and sulky when Nick was
only being nice to you.’

He coloured at the injustice of the accusation. Wasn’t it Bella who had behaved badly, carrying on with ‘her Nick’? But he wanted to see the spectacle of a big ship coming in to dock and the drama of someone he knew disembarking, even if it was only the Bugler Beaver.

‘Well?’ Bella demanded.

‘I’ll keep an eye on the babby for you,’ he said but he would make no pledges as regards the Bugler.

It was like her wedding day again, with all the preparations she went in for. Would she wear her white calico blouse with the lace trim, or her brown dimity skirt? Her best linen petticoat, certainly, and her good paisley shawl and her
wedding
hat, with the feather. For luck, she said. The hat was like a remnant crown, for the rest of Bella was strange to him now. Once he had come upon her and was aghast to see the baby’s greedy mouth grazing against his sister’s teat, red-raw and flayed looking. How had she become this farmyard
creature
, more animal than woman? He blamed the Bugler; this was
his
doing.

It was a humid July day and the streets seemed clamorous and full of threat.

‘Will Nick recognise me, do you think?’ Bella asked as the
Violet
came into view, belching a black cloud. It was a curious question. Why wouldn’t the Bugler recognise her?

‘Absence can wither what was once fair,’ she said, answering
her own question.

A crowd had gathered on the cobbled quay. A bustling crew of hectoring painted women.

‘Gladnecks all,’ Bella muttered, ‘on the lookout for an officer.’

There was a couple of rough-looking men, brawny sailor types with bulging arms who lumbered about officiously
pushing
the women back and clipping the ears of urchins who looked intent on picking pockets. Bella clutched Susan tighter to her bosom, all of a jitter. Echoing her fright, little Susan woke and set up an awful racket, waving her fists in the air, her face screwed up in rancorous distaste, bawling all the while. The ship’s claxon wailed and the avaricious throng of women surged forward, as the gangplank was laid down. Bella was so taken up trying to hush Susan that the Bugler came upon them unawares, Bella in preoccupied disarray and the baby overwrought.