Fathers Come First Read online

  Nice Girls didn’t run down the school corridors, or skid round corners or roll the sleeves of their blouses up or the tops of their knee socks down. Nice girls always curtsied to the head nun, offered to carry the teachers’ books and stood back, flat against the wall, when a group of nuns and visitors passed by.

  Nice Girls kept their uniforms and their bodies without blemish and their desks in the study room exquisitely tidy. Nice Girls didn’t argue with the teachers or the nuns—even if the latter happened to assert that the sun spun continuously round the earth. Nice Girls didn’t tell tales but they always owned up if they’d done something wrong and even offered to clean up other people’s wrongs—if they were really nice girls.

  If Nice Girls were asked what they wanted to be by grown-ups they’d say, ‘The Mother of a Family,’ as if it were a religion; if they were asked by nuns, they’d say, ‘A nun.’

  Nice Girls were unobtrusive. A Nice Girl didn’t smell or raise her voice, or argue, or fight, or hit people over the head for calling her father a Blueshirt.

  Nice Girls gave up all sport once they were sixteen except some polite tennis. They also gave up science and took up domestic because the science teacher had brought in a rabbit for dissection, and Nice Girls cried and tried to make themselves sick in the lav and had to be calmed down by the school nurse.

  Nice Girls kept diaries and made resolutions which they used to cry over, and all went into town to the funeral of the history teacher when she died even though they’d made her life a living hell, and they all screwed up their tiny handkerchiefs into little balls and the women in the town thought they looked awfully pathetic and sweet.

  Nice Girls were the first into bras, the first to wear deodorants, the first to wear nylons, and the first to start washing their knickers every night and sleeping in them to make them dry for the morning.

  Nice Girls wept when they read Little Women, and their reading careers stopped there.

  Nice Girls talked about boys most of the time and how to hook, hoodwink, capture, delight, enslave and enthrall members of that curious race.

  We were all supposed to be Nice Girls.

  —6—

  Every Saturday and Sunday we had what was known as ‘The Parlour’. That is, between the hours of 2.00 p.m. on Saturday and 6.00 p.m. on Sunday, the girls of St Margaret’s Boarding School were available for visits.

  Not just anyone was allowed to visit—only parents, aged relatives, and friends from religious orders, i.e. nuns or priests. The relatives had to be old, otherwise you could have boyfriends turning up on Saturday or Sunday saying, ‘I’m Miss O’Brien’s first cousin and I’d like to take her out for the day.’ Oh, anything could have happened. So, the relatives had to be old. Presumably old ones wouldn’t try anything.

  One Sunday I was reading a novel about the French Revolution. The study room looked as if it were smoking, with gentle streams of sunlight dropped through the high windows. The man in the novel was being taken on the back of a tumbril to have his aristocratic head severed from his neck, but he was going to escape; you didn’t know how.

  The sister’s hand on my shoulder made me jump. ‘You’re wanted in the Parlour,’ she whispered, that special nun whisper that would carry for miles.

  I walked up the study behind the sister. (The sisters worked in the kitchen and on the farm and at reception. They were the country girls, the poor ones, whose fathers couldn’t afford big dowries or expensive educations, so they just crept into the religious orders and looked after the other nuns, the rich ones. The rich nuns were called ‘Ma’am’ and they did the teaching.)

  Once I got out of the study I belted up to the dormitory and flick-brushed my hair and scrabbled through my locker for the one pair of tights Mary (which is what I now call my stepmother as Valerie said it is more sophisticated) had bought me before coming back. They were smelly so I flung them back, did a quick lick over the eyebrows like some actress in some film, and then I was running back down the stairs, down the long corridors, skidding round the corners, not stopping for nuns or anyone and feeling the ‘Tschs’ and the sighs following me, catching in my way like little twigs when you’re running through a forest, today not minding them, and coming to the door of the Parlour and suddenly stopping – thinking, Who can it be? Nobody ever comes to visit me in the Parlour.

  I was thinking, I’ll go back and find the sister and ask her to describe the visitor to me, when the door of the Parlour swung open and the nun smiled—‘Ah! Here she is!’ I stood there feeling stripped naked, the faces smiling before me.

  They were the Hickeys. Mr and Mrs and Jack. Mrs Hickey was smoking and laughing at something the nun had said. The smoke was filling the tiny room with its polished table, parquet floor, overstuffed armchairs (with linen doilies on the arms and back to stop the upholstery getting soiled), The Messenger and The Life of St Theresa on the table and a bowl of flowers—waxy-looking flowers.

  ‘Hello then Lizzie,’ Mrs Hickey said. I cleared my throat and said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘So,’ Mrs Hickey said, pleased with herself, her smoke billowing round her, ‘So where, Sister, do you think would be the best place to go?’ You could see the nun wincing. She was supposed to be called ‘Ma’am’. She’d surely take it out on me later.

  Mrs Hickey didn’t seem to notice. The nun looked smaller, paler, under the bright battery of questions.

  ‘The Abbey ruins are said to make a nice trip,’ said the nun. (She had to say, ‘are said to’, because the nuns never went out, so she was just passing on advice she’d been given by some other visitors.)

  ‘Oh ruins indeed,’ said Mrs Hickey with a bouncing laugh, and you thought the nun might crack in two under the weight and sharpness of it. She pressed her lips together. Her hands were under her habit, clenching. You felt sure they must have been clenching.

  Outside the sun was so bright. You felt like a worm coming out from under a stone, soft and white.

  Jack was wearing his cricket whites and a purple blazer. They’d picked him up at his school on the way down. He said hello, but looked cross and scuffed pebbles as you walked to the car.

  You wondered, So will it always be like this? One week they say, ‘I love you’, and there are kisses and odd rushing feelings, then a month later there’s a silence, a coldness, and they don’t look at you. It’s like being a child again. You thought being sixteen would be so much better. One minute they pat you on the head, they laugh at you, they say, ‘Oh now, listen to the funny child.’ Then their faces go sour, like old green apples. They say, ‘Oh get along with you now, off you go to the nursery,’ or, ‘Off you go to bed.’ You think, Perhaps men will be like parents: difficult to please, difficult to understand, difficult to follow because they’re busy or talking to someone or just about to dash off to the College, darling. Yes. You think men are bound to be like that.

  ‘It’s so bloody antediluvian, Char,’ Mrs Hickey was saying, linking her husband’s arm; the two of them were laughing, but he said, ‘Wait till we get out of earshot, Vera.’ You felt a bit of a fool. Being in a place they thought so odd.

  We got into their car. An old Peugeot saloon with brown leather seats, the upholstery done like thick sausages. It was like their house, full of old Sunday papers and empty bottles and cigarette packs squashed flat.

  Jack and I sat in the back. We were careful not to touch each other. He looked out the window and whistled through his teeth. Mr Hickey said, ‘Why don’t we go and knock up old Foster for a couple of jars?’ and Mrs Hickey said, ‘Why not?’ and she lit up more cigarettes and offered us one. I said, ‘I don’t indulge thanks’ and Mrs Hickey thought that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and I laughed a bit, just to be polite; it’s always difficult to laugh so much when you’ve started the joke. Jack smoked.

  Jack said, ‘Thanks for your letter.’ I said, ‘Oh not at all, it was just for something to do really.’ I t
hought, Sweet Jesus let him keep his voice down. I could hear Mrs Hickey’s laugh. ‘Oh love letters is it?’

  Jack just went on looking out of the window. So, I thought, no more letters.

  Then Mr Hickey turned on the radio. It was Top of the Pops. Jack and I hummed the tunes, looking out the windows. He laughed; he said I’d got the words wrong, but at least it was better than trying to talk. Every time we went round corners I could see him without turning my head round and actually staring.

  The part of the country we were driving through was very nice. It was full of small lakes, grey ones with reeds like little crowds round the edges, bending. It had boggy ground and rivers connecting the lakes so the road seemed a very definite sort of hardness and blackness in the midst of the bogs and the wetness. The country is quite flat and if you go very fast it looks like streaming greens and browns—soft. But if you go slowly you can see all the holes and hillocks and bits of rock barely covered with moss and different grasses and then it’s a wild endless rug of colours and textures.

  The Fosters, who we are going to see, are Protestants like the Hickeys. They’re the same Protestants who came to Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were given, or ‘bought up’ (they paid almost nothing) huge tracts of land, the best land in the soft green heart of the country. Some were given the land as a reward for fighting the King of England’s wars, or the Queen of England’s—something like that. The Irish peasants were shoved out to boggy land where they could only grow spuds and scratch around for a living. The Irish were always fighting each other so they never got time to get organized and fight the English off their land.

  At school we had three main things against Protestants. They had taken the land off our ancestors; they didn’t believe that the Virgin Mary was God’s mother or in the miracles at Lourdes or anything else for that matter; and they weren’t Catholics.

  My father knew a lot of Protestants because most of the other professors and lecturers at his University were Protestants and it was even supposed to be a mortal sin for Catholics to go to his University, though many of them did anyway.

  I once asked my father if it was true that all Protestants would burn in hell and he said, ‘Ah go on with all that rubbish, who’s telling ye that?’ I was sent out of history class for a whole week then because I said my father had told me that blaming the Prods for everything, and saying they’d burn in hell, was a lot of rubbish.

  The Fosters were rich Protestants. They had a big farm and then a business in Dublin as well. Mr Foster was always flying to London for working trips. He’d fly to London on business the way most people would take a bus from Sandymount to town. He used to come and visit my father sometimes when he was in Dublin and they’d take the bottle of port or wine into my father’s study and talk about the times when the Protestants had all the big country houses. Mr Foster was a sort of amateur historian on Protestant history in Ireland.

  The Fosters’ house is an old Georgian one. Its left wing is completely covered in Virginia Creeper that moves like a lake the whole time, whispering. Inside there are long stone passages where the centre is worn down from thousands and thousands of footsteps of maids and manservants and butlers walking, running, scurrying, to answer the bell-pull of the lord and lady of the manor. There are huge fireplaces where you put logs the size of six-year-old children and they don’t stick out.

  The house is full of smells and sighs and echoes. There are rooms that are quite empty. There’s one room where the boards groan as you walk in and a wooden rocking horse stands in the centre. The Fosters spend most of their time in the drawing room. The rest of the rooms huddle around with their memories. Once there were tutors, and governesses, and children exploring, and aunts.

  Mary, my stepmother, my father and I once visited the Fosters on a Sunday. Mary said, ‘For heaven’s sake, why don’t you get in some central heating, let off the east wing during the summer and get fitted carpets for the bedrooms you use and the lounge?’ The Fosters looked at her and nobody said anything. Mrs Foster looked as if she’d been asked: Why don’t you buy yourself a nice see-through blouse and miniskirt instead of that old tweed suit? But nobody said anything. Mr Foster went Hmph, and sort of grinned and said to his wife, ‘Well now, what about another cup of tea, uh?’

  Today anyway we drove up the long avenue, the trees nudging each other as we passed by.

  Mr Foster appeared in the hall door and about five dogs came barking and jumping over the gravel. The Hickeys shook his hand and then Mrs Hickey drew me forward and said, ‘This is Miles O’Sullivan’s daughter, you remember her of course?’ Mr Foster put a hand on each of my shoulders and said, ‘My, my.’ He didn’t say, ‘How you’ve grown,’ but it was the same thing, the way he looked and was surprised.

  It was only then that I realized I was still in my navy blue school uniform. Socks too, and oh, I wished for the tights even though they had been a bit smelly. I wanted to be gone, away, dead. Jack looked so casual in his cricket gear—damn men, it was always easier for them, always.

  Mr Foster kept saying, ‘Well now, what a nice surprise,’ and he walked into the house and we all followed and he shouted for his wife: ‘Visitors, darling.’

  Mrs Foster is like a hungry cat. She’s so thin and nervy. She dives at words and people and conversations as if they were the first and last she’d ever get. She was wearing this sort of long dress which Valerie told me later was a housecoat.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she said with a screeching smile on her face. She darted at each one of us and then darted at the door and shrieked, ‘Dora! Bring four more cups.’

  ‘Vera, how are you?’ she said to Mrs Hickey, her head on one side like a thrush. She said it as if she expected something awful to have happened to Mrs Hickey.

  Mrs Hickey was saying, ‘Oh fine thanks’ and fishing in her bag for her lighter and trying to catch Mr Hickey’s eye so he’d get her a light.

  Mrs Foster jumped up (‘Oh how stupid of me’) and she turned to her son who was watching everything with the amused, and I thought entirely faked, tolerance of a twenty-year-old.

  The son was called Alec. He was reading History and Philosophy at Trinity. Before that he’d been educated at a public school in England. He seemed the epitome of education and sophistication and maleness. Everything we as ‘Nice Girls’ had been told to long and look for. Jack suddenly looked gauche and awkward. The Protestants in England give themselves a much better education, I thought to myself.

  Alec nodded as we were introduced and his hair slid forward on his forehead as he did so, so he had to flip his head back. You knew he’d practised that.

  Mrs Foster stood for a minute, perplexed, almost as if she’d forgotten who she was. Then she said, ‘Ah yes, and this is Pepita,’ and her hand fluttered towards Pepita. Pepita was Alec’s girlfriend and she was also at Trinity, reading English Lit. She said, ‘Helleow’ and smiled without opening her lips. I thought she was beautiful—all legs, like a foal. She had her legs curled up under her and she made the battered old armchair look comfortable, attractive. She was one of those kinds of people.

  ‘What’ll we all have to drink then?’ Mr Foster shouted, and stood by the sideboard, rubbing his hands like a butcher. The Hickeys said they’d have gin and tonics, and Jack said he’d have a beer, and I said a gin and tonic because I’d had one before at a wedding. The others already had drinks. We all got big thick glasses full of gin and tonic and the ice clinked, and the drinks sparkled blue.

  Pepita said, ‘Would you like some music?’ to nobody in particular, and walked over to the record player and sank down onto her knees and slicked her index finger over the record sleeves. I thought she looked like a little child; she did everything so gently, so humbly, people must have wanted to protect her, particularly men. She put on a John McCormack record and his thick voice filled the room: ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes …’

  I thou
ght of an article I’d read somewhere about what prisoners feel like during their first week or so out of prison; how apart and different and somehow undefined they think they are. That’s how I felt out of boarding school. I thought if my head were shaved it would make no difference. Everyone else seemed so sure of themselves. They talked, laughed, made jokes, chose records, just walked about the room. You felt yourself to be all corners and your words came out heavy and blunt like unrisen bread. The older ones, particularly the older women, ones like Pepita, they’d always look better, you thought, always look at ease.

  Dora, this very cross maid, came in, and then banged out, with the tea things. Little cucumber sandwiches, cakes, shortbread—you’d almost die for one of them when you got back to school but everyone else seemed so disinterested; you were determined not to be different. At least as little different as possible. Not to fall on the plate and gobble them and run out to the garden like a dog does and finish them all up, nervously looking over your shoulder.

  The gin was beginning to give me a tight feeling above the bridge of my nose; my eyes felt bulgy and slightly sensitive.

  Alec said, ‘Would you like to go and look at the horses?’ and got up to walk out.

  I said, ‘Oh yes’ and jumped up because I’d been dying to see the horses all afternoon but you couldn’t ask. I knocked over Mrs Hickey’s glass of gin and somebody said, ‘Aha, tiddly again,’ and Mrs Foster shouted ‘Dora!’ and I just stood looking at the gin on the carpet and Mrs Hickey smiled and patted my hand and Alec said, ‘Oh come on. Who cares about the bloody carpet?’

  Alec, Jack and I walked out into the sunlight across the cobbled yard to the stables. Pepita stayed behind.

  I had cousins in Dublin who had horses and last summer I’d gone over to their house quite a lot at weekends and we used to go riding in the park in the evening and the cold air would be like hands pulling at your cheeks, pony hooves stamping a cross pattern on the ground; your body and your mind would be like a streamer, all in one concentration of movement.