In Sunshine Or In Shadow Page 5

  As soon as lunch was over, Nanny came and collected Artemis for her walk.

  ‘I hope you ate up,’ she said, sitting her on the stairs to change the child’s shoes. ‘I hope you didn’t fiddle with your food.’

  ‘No I didn’t, I didn’t ate up,’ Artemis told her.

  ‘Chicken, wasn’t it?’ Nanny said. ‘Cook told me, chicken.’

  Artemis said nothing, suddenly feeling sick and faint.

  ‘We’ll go down the back way,’ Nanny told her, ‘and out through the kitchen gardens.’

  She took Artemis down a back flight of stairs and along a corridor which ran under one of the colonnades, and then through the kitchen wing, along another long corridor with rooms in which Artemis had never been.

  Someone ran up the corridor behind them. ‘Nanny?’ the voice called. ‘Wait!’

  It was Rosie, red-faced from running, and from the heat of the kitchens.

  ‘We haven’t got long, Rosie,’ Nanny said. ‘So you’d better hurry please, or we’ll be for it.’

  Rosie took Artemis by the hand and led her down the corridor to a small room right at the end. She stopped outside the door.

  ‘Listen, your ladyship,’ she said. ‘Listen.’ Then she grinned at Nanny.

  Artemis listened as she was told. She heard nothing at all.

  ‘Stupid thing,’ Rosie said, with another grin, then kicked the door.

  Now Artemis heard something, something feathery shaking itself, and then clucking, in a low, solemn cluck. She turned to Rosie. ‘Don’t be silly, it can’t be,’ she gasped, her voice faltering.

  ‘Don’t be silly?’ Rosie echoed with a laugh. ‘You ’ave a look then.’

  Artemis opened the door. There in a pool of sunlight which flooded the storeroom stood a fat brown chicken with one corkscrew leg. She rushed in and gathered her beloved hen to her, burying her face in its feathers, as the hen began to squawk with surprise and excitement.

  ‘However did you do it, Rosie?’

  ‘Changed it for another, didn’t I?’ Rosie told her proudly. ‘Cook wasn’t ’avin’ any of that nonsense. She knew what her ladyship was up to, we all did, and we thought it was quite disgustin’.’

  ‘That’s quite enough of that, thank you, Rosie,’ Nanny said firmly.

  ‘So did you, Nanny,’ Rosie protested. ‘You said yourself it was a terrible thing to do.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ Nanny agreed. ‘I mean serving up a one-legged chicken in front of all those guests. I never heard the like.’

  ‘What a way of putting it, Nanny,’ said Rosie, laughing in disbelief.

  ‘I can’t really thank you enough, Rosie,’ Artemis told her.

  ‘You don’t ’ave to, Lady Artemis,’ said Rosie, and she smiled. ‘The look on your face is enough.’

  Artemis looked at her and then, suddenly and quite accountably, burst into tears.

  1923

  3

  It was Ellie Milligan’s intention never to be caught crying in public again. Ever since that night when, with their father away inspecting a distant building site, they had been left alone in the house for the first time, and the ‘broth’ had decided to wreak mayhem.

  From somewhere Fergal had got hold of a bottle of hooch, and the three eldest sat round the kitchen table getting their first taste of hard liquor, and smoking their way through a packet of Camel cigarettes, while Ellie and Patsy, locked into the room with them, were forced to watch. Ellie could sense there was going to be bad trouble, and it wasn’t long in coming. Patsy was naturally selected as the target.

  ‘Let’s black him,’ Fergal suddenly announced, when they had all but drunk their way through the bottle. ‘Let’s take all the little bastard’s clothes off, and see how he looks as a nigger.’

  ‘No!’ Ellie shouted. ‘No you leave Patsy alone! You leave him alone, do you hear!’

  The ‘broth’ paid her no attention, but sat looking at their chosen victim, with crooked smiles on all their faces.

  ‘He’s got lips like a nigger,’ Dermot said.

  ‘She’s got lips like a nigger,’ Fergal corrected.

  ‘No,’ said Mike. ‘She’s got lips like a negress.’

  Patsy was standing quite still, back against the sink, watching his bully-boy brothers with his big dark eyes, as they stared stupidly back at him. Fergal started to stand, pushing back his chair, and as he did so, Ellie made a bolt for the door.

  Dermot got there before her. ‘And where do you think you’re going, sis?’ he asked. ‘To fetch a policeman, maybe?’

  ‘Go away!’ Ellie yelled. ‘Just leave me alone!’

  She scrabbled at the door in one last and futile effort to unlock the door, but Dermot pulled her back.

  ‘What shall we do with this little vixen, eh?’ Dermot asked, twisting Ellie’s arm up high behind her until, unable to bear the pain any longer, she started to cry.

  ‘Don’t you ever do anything else ’cept grizzle?’ Mike asked, pulling her hair. ‘All you and sister Patsy do is just grizzle.’

  ‘Shut her under the stairs,’ Fergal ordered.

  ‘No!’ screamed Ellie. ‘No, not under the stairs, please no!’

  ‘Shut her under the stairs.’

  Mike and Dermot dragged her off, still crying and screaming, while Fergal held Patsy by both his elbows, which he had pulled behind Patsy’s back. Dermot opened the half-sized door and Mike shoved Ellie into the pitch darkness.

  ‘You can grizzle and yell ’s’much as you like under there, sis,’ Dermot said. ‘’Cos we’re not lettin’ you out till you learn to shut up.’

  They bolted the door closed, top and bottom, and left Ellie crammed tight against all the junk that was stuffed into the tiny space. She banged her fists against the door, and yelled and screamed, but the ‘broth’ had gone back to the kitchen.

  They left her in there, wedged among the wooden boxes and brooms, and bric-a-brac, barely able to move one way or the other, for the next two hours, while they stripped Patsy naked, covered him all over with shoe polish, and locked him out the front of the house for a while to see what it was like being a naked little ‘nigger boy’ in Westfield Drive.

  That was the night Ellie vowed she would never cry in front of anyone again as she lay among the boxes. While Patsy silently and privately swore his revenge as he tried to scrub himself clean.

  Now ten years old, Ellie was more or less expected to run the house day by day. She was rarely at school, kept away constantly by a variety of excuses dreamed up by her father and brothers who all decided that an education was of less use to Ellie than a clean and tidy home was to them. Even on Sundays she was expected to spend her day scrubbing, cleaning, cooking and tidying, once the family had attended Mass.

  On this particular Sunday, Ellie had finished all her chores by mid-afternoon, and had the house to herself. The ‘broth’ were all out in the park, where they would remain until tea time, and Patsy was over with a boy called Ed, who had befriended Patsy at school. Ed was thin and undersized like Patsy, but he was fit and strong, because he boxed. And he was now teaching young Patsy, unbeknownst to his elder brothers, the rudiments of the noble art of self-defence.

  Best of all, her father was six blocks away, playing poker at Harry Reilly’s. That was his Sunday ritual: over to Harry’s for cards as soon as lunch was eaten, and back at exactly a quarter after six, to read the Sunday papers and then sleep off the drink. Ellie understood nothing about prohibition. All she knew was that her father and his friends were never short of anything to drink.

  Three o’clock exactly. The old wooden case-clock at the foot of the stairs where Ellie was standing chimed the hour, as if to tell her she had two hours to herself before the ‘broth’ returned, and three and a quarter hours before her father did likewise. Plenty of time to go quietly upstairs, take the key down from behind the faded watercolour of the lakes of Killarney, and slip it into the lock of her dead mother’s bedroom. And to step into the shrine. For that’s what her mother’s r
oom was, a reliquary for a woman gone, a monument to a long-dead wife. Nothing had been moved, and nothing had been changed, not since that fatal October day, when Ellie had been born and her mother had died. It was a room no-one ever came into, except the dead woman’s husband, who visited it religiously every Sunday morning before Mass, locking himself in for an hour, while, Ellie guessed, he dusted and tidied the shrine he had created, and prayed for the soul of the one departed.

  Every time Ellie crept into her dead mother’s room, she knew she should not be there, and she would hesitate on the threshold of the airless room, while the skin on her scalp prickled with a guilty excitement. She hadn’t meant to find the key. It wasn’t as if she had searched for it, determined to see what lay behind the forever locked door. She had found it quite by accident, due to her diligence. If she had not learned to clean so thoroughly she would never have taken each and every picture off the wall to dust both the picture and the wall behind.

  And there was the key, carefully jammed into the frame of the old watercolour. Ellie knew at once which door it must unlock, because the room at the end of the landing was the only room kept locked. But still, for week after week, she never dared see if she was right, because she was afraid of what she might find within.

  For a long time she imagined she might open the door and see the body of her mother, stretched out in death on her bed, her arms folded across her chest, her eyes still open and staring at the ceiling. She knew that dead people could be kept in this state because the man who lived next door to Mrs MacDonagh worked in an undertakers, and Ellie had heard him talking about it to Mrs MacDonagh. So it was many weeks before Ellie dared try the key in the lock.

  And when she did, she eased open the door, but not before she had shut her eyes. For an age she simply had not dared open them, until finally, unable to resist any longer, she opened and shut them again once and very quickly.

  But there was nothing on the bed. Nobody and no body. Just a shiny pink counterpane, with a nightgown folded neatly in the middle of the bolster. Over the back of a chair in one corner lay a dress, neatly hanging, while on the seat of chair lay a small pile of immaculate underthings. The dressing table was laid out with hairbrushes, mirrors and small mother-of-pearl boxes, and on the table by the bed was a rosary, a missal and a photograph.

  Arthur Leopold of County Cork had taken the picture, and the first time Ellie had tiptoed into the bedroom she had stood for a long time staring at the photograph, because it was the first time she had ever seen the likeness of her dead mother. She was beautiful, small of face but with big dark eyes, just like Patsy’s, and very serious looking, just like Ellie herself. Ellie tried to imagine how her mother must have felt as she had left Ireland by boat, to sail the Atlantic and marry a man she had met only a handful of times. Looking even more closely at the photograph and the innocence in her mother’s eyes, Ellie had decided that her mother must have felt very shy.

  Today she closed the door quietly behind her, and tiptoed over to the polished wooden closet, as she always did, to look at her mother’s dresses. She had learned when she had held the first costume up against her, that her mother had been small, hardly, it seemed, an inch or two taller than Ellie was now. On subsequent visits, as she had grown bolder, Ellie had started trying some of her mother’s clothes on, first over her own dress, and then over just her underclothes. They were lovely clothes, beautifully made from fine materials, and if Ellie took a tuck with her hand at the back of the dresses, and turned the hems up a good six or nine inches, looking in the dressing mirror she could get more than a fair impression of how she might look once she too was a young woman.

  At the back of the closet on a separate hook hung her mother’s wedding gown. Ellie had often taken it down before, but had never dared try it on. But today, with more time at her disposal, she could no longer resist the adventure, and in a moment she was out of her own plain black Sunday dress, with its detachable white collar and cuffs, and into the sumptuous white silk which had clothed her dead mother once and for just a few short hours.

  She found her mother’s wedding shoes, and her headpiece and veil as well. And then when she was fully dressed, she shut the closet door over and stood looking at herself in the mirror which was on the other side. She stood dreaming, trying to imagine what it must be like to walk up the aisle to the side of a man who was waiting to marry you, and so enthralled was she with her imaginings that she never heard him. She never heard the front door close, nor his foot fall on the stairs, nor even the bedroom door slowly opening behind her.

  And then suddenly she saw his image in the looking glass.

  ‘And what’s this?’ her father said, almost too quietly. ‘What have we here then?’

  Ellie turned and looked at him, at a loss for any words. ‘Pa,’ was all she managed. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘No,’ said her father, ‘I should imagine you didn’t. And I should imagine from looking at you, you didn’t imagine I’d be home so soon either.’

  ‘I can explain,’ Ellie said. ‘Really I can.’

  ‘Is that so?’ her father asked. ‘Is that really so. Well now. Well now I’d often wondered what you got up to when I left you here.’

  ‘Pa – really –’

  ‘And now I know, Eleanor. Now I know.’

  He said nothing more for a while, leaving Ellie to stand waiting his instructions as he walked slowly round the room, as if to make sure nothing else had been violated.

  ‘You know full well you’re not allowed in here, Eleanor,’ he said finally turning back to her. ‘No-one’s allowed in here, you know that perfectly well.’

  ‘I know, Pa,’ Ellie replied. ‘I just didn’t think –’

  ‘You just didn’t think,’ her father interrupted. ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘I didn’t think there was any harm,’ Ellie finished.

  Her father looked at her and nodded, which was a sure sign that he disagreed with what she had just said.

  ‘If Harry hadn’t been rushed off to the hospital with chest pains today,’ he continued, ‘then I’d still be at a loss as to know what my only daughter gets up to when my back is turned.’

  ‘I’ll get out of these things,’ Ellie volunteered in the ensuing silence. ‘I was only dressing up.’

  ‘Dressing up,’ her father said thoughtfully. ‘Dressing up.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ellie concurred. ‘So I’ll be out of these things in one minute.’

  ‘No,’ said her father suddenly. ‘You’ll do no such thing. You’ll stay as you are and come downstairs with me.’

  He took Ellie by her forearm, and marched her down the landing and the painted uncarpeted stairs into the living room, where he sat her in the big chair in the corner.

  ‘You’re to sit there, do you hear?’ he instructed. ‘And you’re not to move until I tell you.’

  ‘Why?’ Ellie asked, puzzled by the quite unpredictable run of events. She had expected violence, she had thought her father would shout and roar at her, she was certain he would beat her. But he had done none of these things. Instead he had kept his temper, and not even threatened to raise his hand.

  ‘Why am I to sit here, please?’ Ellie repeated her question since her father had paid it no attention first time round.

  ‘Because I want the boys to see how pretty you are,’ her father told her. ‘And to see if you remind them of anybody.’

  It was over an hour before the eldest boys came home from the park, during which time Ellie was made to sit quite still and not move. After such a long wait, Ellie was so stiff and so fearful, that she was almost relieved to hear them, laughing and jeering at each other, and then greeting their father, whom they were surprised to see home.

  ‘I’ve another surprise for you, me boys,’ their father said. ‘Next door in the living room.’

  The ‘broth’ came through, followed closely by the tall figure of their father, who stood right behind his boys as they stood and stared at their sister.
>
  ‘Stand up, Eleanor,’ her father instructed. ‘So they may see how you are.’

  Ellie stood, all but swamped by her dead mother’s wedding dress.

  ‘Sure it’s a little large,’ her father said, ‘but the impression’s there all right. Wouldn’t you say so, Fergal? Wouldn’t you say there’s enough of an impression there to remind you of someone? Of someone we all loved very dearly?’

  ‘Yes, Pa,’ Fergal answered, staring hard at Ellie. ‘She looks the image of Mother.’

  ‘I knew you’d see it, me boy,’ his father smiled, putting an arm round his eldest’s shoulder. ‘Couldn’t you be looking at herself? Isn’t that all but a miniature of your poor dead mother, God rest her? All but a miniature. All but for her goodness and her grace.’

  ‘I don’t get it, Pa,’ Dermot said. ‘What’s Ellie doing all dressed up in Mother’s clothes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mike added, ‘what in heck’s she doing, Pa?’

  ‘She’s thinking, my boys,’ their father told them, ‘she’s thinking of taking the place of your mother, because she’s thinking she’s become every bit as pretty as her, God rest her soul indeed. And every bit as good.’

  ‘She can never be as pretty as our mother,’ Fergal said. ‘She could never be half as pretty. Not even a quarter.’

  ‘Ah well,’ sighed his father. ‘Sure you know young girls. Don’t they just think the world of themselves?’

  ‘She could never be as good as our mother neither,’ Dermot growled, his eyes blazing with hate for his sister. ‘Jeeze – if that wasn’t mother’s dress, I’d tear it right off her.’

  ‘What in heck is she wearing it for anyway, Pa?’ Fergal shouted, shaking off his father’s half restraining hand and moving threateningly close to Ellie. ‘What are you doing in Mother’s wedding dress, eh? You little scut! You tell me now, or I’ll pull every hair from your head!’ Fergal already had hold of Ellie’s long brown hair, and was jerking her head backwards.

  ‘Come now, boy,’ his father said, finally pulling his eldest son away, but not for a good half minute. ‘You know that’s no way to treat a lady.’