Fathers Come First Read online

  The Fosters had six horses and two ponies. Two of the horses they didn’t own but just stabled for this English businessman who used to come over and hunt during the Irish hunting season.

  We looked into each loose box and the horses shuffled around and blew down their noses at us and twitched their ears, and the groom called Alec ‘Master Alec’ and wore old-fashioned riding breeches and leather leggings, polished like a stone in a brown pool. Ancient.

  Alec asked if we’d like to go for a ride; Jack said he didn’t mind and I said I’d love to. So Alec said to the groom, ‘Bailey, saddle up the mare and the gelding will you?’ and went off to get me a pair of his sister’s jodhpurs.

  Alec took a big strong bay horse, Jack took Alec’s roan gelding and I took his sister’s Connemara mare. The mare was cream with a deep brown-black mane and tail. We rode out under the arch, across the paddock and then swung down along the avenue. Alec was very casual, twisting round in his saddle, the reins in one hand his other hand resting on his horse’s broad hindquarters; Jack was very stiff, holding the reins high; I could feel the mare’s warmth beneath me and her delicate stepping and I thought, May this go on for ever and ever.

  That year we were having an Indian summer. It was late September and the sun still had a golden softening warmth in it. The slanting winds and rain hadn’t begun yet.

  Alec broke into a trot and then a canter and the mare pricked her ears forward and followed and I could see Jack still stiff and bumping along, his horse uncomfortable. Then we were galloping, the horses exciting each other, and you were in control and yet not in control, and you tore the air apart in front of you like ripping silk.

  I turned round just in time to see Jack careering over his horse’s head. He’d put the horse at a fallen tree; the horse just stopped dead in front of it, and Jack carried on and landed on the ground like a bag of potatoes. ‘Damn and bloody damn’ said Jack and you wanted to laugh but didn’t. He was brushing the leaves off and there was a bright green stain down his cricket whites, like green blood.

  Jack said he’d had enough. He said he was going to walk back to the house and he’d see us there later. He climbed back up on his horse again and then Alec shouted, ‘Okay, c’mon,’ to me and we galloped off away into the wet reds and browns of the Foster woods.

  We stopped finally by an old gate lodge at the edge of the woods. There was a river running below. The lodge was covered in ivy, the windows under fronds of greenery, buried like a Yorkshire terrier’s eyes.

  ‘Why don’t we get down?’ Alec said. ‘Come and have a look inside. It’s my sort of private den since I was a kid.’

  I got down. My legs felt funny, the ground swaying slightly. I hadn’t ridden for weeks. We looped the horses’ reins over a gatepost. Alec said, ‘They won’t go away.’

  Alec opened the door, pushing it back stiffly. ‘As the spider said to the fly, “Won’t you come into my parlour?”’ he said, and stood back and I went in.

  It was very dark inside; the ivy kept the light out. A dark, dank smell. In one corner was an old sofa, the other a desk, then an old record player, some books, a kitchen dresser.

  Alec banged down into the sofa. ‘Whaddya think of it?’ he said. ‘Mmm, it’s lovely,’ I said. ‘It must have been very nice to have somewhere to be on your own when you were a child.’ It sounded prim even as I said it. He laughed. ‘Even better now.’ He had one arm along the back of the sofa. ‘Come along then, sit down, relax.’ He said the words like orders. I knew I was going to sit down. I felt powerless suddenly, goggle-eyed, like a rabbit in front of a ferret.

  I didn’t dare look at Alec. I wished I’d never come in here. I sat on the edge of the sofa without letting my back touch the sofa back where Alec’s hand lay.

  ‘I’m not going to eat you, you know,’ Alec said, and he laughed a smug laugh.

  ‘I know,’ I said. I know, I thought. I know he’s going to try it.

  I don’t want it. Yet I do. It’s some sort of recognition, isn’t it? But I’m scared. It will be something to tell them at school. But I’m scared. I want to go back.

  ‘Don’t you think we’d better go back?’ I said. I thought: For God’s sake, my voice sounds ludicrous.

  ‘No hurry,’ said Alec. ‘No hurry at all.’ He brought his hand down from the back of the sofa. Started tickling the back of my neck. Then stretching his fingers up through my hair so I got goose pimples all over. Then he jerked round and pushed me back against the sofa and I could feel his face and his hair in my eyes and his teeth were hurting my lip and his hands were scrabbling in my clothes and he was saying, or sort of groaning, ‘Hold me, hold me’ and he jammed his knee up between my legs and then I just bit his tongue as hard as I could.

  ‘You little—’ He jumped up and stood looking at me and was yelling, ‘You bloody little Catholic virgin!’ and he was panting and I thought, He’s going to punch me, really punch me in the face, but he just stood there: ‘Rubbish … schoolgirl … virgin … whore … kid…’ and he was shouting the words and I thought he looked ugly and cruel and I felt awful and yet I felt: Well it’s better than that … but than what?

  Alec slammed outside and took a few mouthfuls of water from the river and flattened his hair down and I came out after him, very quiet, and I got back up onto the mare.

  We rode back to the house. All the warmth and strength seemed to have left the sky. It seemed the colours were stretched thinly, the sky itself deflated like an old polythene bag.

  Alec said nothing. He didn’t ask me not to tell anyone what had happened. He didn’t have to. He knew I’d failed, not him. There were certain rules. If you broke them you took the broken pieces away with you and they clattered around inside your head: Fraud … fraud… fraud.

  —7—

  The nuns said: ‘Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. You must always therefore treat it with loving respect.’

  The woman from Dorothy Grey said: ‘You must regard your face as a blank board and etch in beauty like an artist … everyone can be beautiful.’

  The nuns said: ‘Your body is the source of many temptations to sin. Your mouth can eat too much and drink too much; your eyes can see, read, watch, evil things; your hands can make mischief: idle hands for the devil’s work; your legs can lead you into occasions of mortal sin …’

  The song said: ‘My face is my fortune, sir.’

  The girl in the magazine said: ‘You too can have a body like mine if you use this super lotion’; ‘Watch out for the New You when you wear Sparklelight’; ‘Make yourself this fabulous sexy dress’.

  The nuns said: ‘The love between a man and his wife is a very beautiful thing. But sex. Sex is dirty. Sex is sinful. Sex is spitting in the face of God . . . Girls, the switching off of the ignition key can be the start of a mortal sin. Girls, girls, we must always be chaste, pure …’

  The young girl in the love comic said: ‘His first kiss sent a quivering passion through my body. I could feel the texture of his hands, strong yet bony, through the thin stuff of my dress ... I thought he must hear my heart pounding—to me it sounded like the thunder of the gods …’

  The nuns said: ‘God made you. God loves you. God will forgive you. God has punished you. God is watching you. God is testing you.’

  The magazine said: ‘Test whether you are really in love’ (it gave you twenty questions to fill in with a choice of three each time). ‘Do you feel your heart skipping a beat whenever you hear his name mentioned? Do you blush constantly? Would you mind if your best friend told you she’d been asked by him to go to a party? Have you lost your appetite?’

  The nuns said: ‘Come along then, eat up, otherwise you won’t grow up to be a big, strong girl.’

  The book said: ‘Today’s girl is tall and slim; she moves with the sleek elegance of the greyhound and the casual grace of the wild animal.’
/>   The nuns said: ‘If it weren’t for our souls we’d be just like wild animals.’

  The comic said: ‘They ran into the bedroom and fell on each other like animals …’

  The nuns said: ‘We want you to grow up to be the handmaids of Christ.’

  The magazine said: ‘It is still every young girl’s dream to grow up and be the mother of a family. It’s the most natural thing in the world.’

  The boy said: ‘I want to grow up and be a soldier, and boss people around, like my Dad does.’

  The girl said: ‘When I grow up I’m going to have a house with three bedrooms, and twenty dresses, and a husband as rich as rich as …’

  The girl in the film said: ‘More than anything else in the world I want to be your wife. I want to give you my whole self … my all …’

  The hymn said: ‘All I have I give Thee, give Thyself to me …’

  The song said: ‘All you need is love, love, love. Love is all you need.’

  The advertisement said: ‘Feeling depressed? What you need is a course of these revolutionary, new, extra, extra strong vitamin tablets.’

  Your stepmother said: ‘What you need is a haircut and some new clothes.’

  The nuns said: ‘What you need is the strong hand of discipline all your life.’

  Your father said: ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you need.’

  The advertisements said: ‘You need this and that and the other and then you’ll be different, younger, sexier, sleeker, thinner, fatter, glossier, posher …’

  The man in the comic said to the bookish girl: ‘What you need, my dear girl, is a man.’

  You said: ‘What I need … is … is …’

  So it goes on.

  —8—

  My second last term at school I fell in love. The girl was called Ann. She was from Mullingar. She was called Ann because her father had wanted a boy and was going to call him Dan. When a girl arrived they called her Ann. A compensation.

  Ann’s father was a big cattle farmer. She had two brothers and five sisters. They used to all come and visit her; the father red-faced and always looking angry, though it may have been fear that made him look like that. The children sat in the back of the big black Mercedes and looked out. Ann’s father was in with all the big Fianna Fáil men in the country. That’s how he made his money.

  He always called his wife Mrs Gilligan as if they were strangers. He’d say, ‘Well now, Mrs Gilligan …’

  The Gilligans wanted their children to ‘have a bit of class’. That’s why they sent Ann to the boarding school. They wanted Ann to be ‘a lady’, a nice, well-brought-up young lady. That’s what our school was supposed to do to people.

  Ann talked with a very soft, flat accent, the way people from Mullingar do. She was fat and had curly hair. Her mother wanted tall blonde children. The Gilligan children were all fat, and freckly, and curly-haired. Her mother wouldn’t give her sweets or cakes. She’d met a woman at the Irish Countrywomen’s Association Annual General Meeting in Dublin who’d told her the best thing for making your fat, curly children look like sleek ones, was to give them carrot juice and cabbage juice and never give them any cakes.

  Ann was tormented by the other girls saying, ‘Ah now, beef to the heels like a Mullingar heifer.’ The heifers in Mullingar are supposed to be some of the plumpest in the country.

  I bought Ann cakes. I asked my stepmother to send me my post office savings, which had been accumulating towards a record player. I watched her as she sat on my bed in the dormitory and ate through the sweets and cakes, methodically, inexorably. I’d panic in the night wondering where I’d get more money for more sweets and cakes.

  I planned to run away from school with Ann. The two of us with our overcoats on over our nightdresses would hitch-hike up the Dublin road at two o’clock in the morning, tell the man we were maids up at the convent, and the nuns had given us such a brutal time that we’d run away. He’d give us a fiver and we’d take the Liverpool boat and get jobs in England.

  Ann said I had lovely legs. She looked up from a Woman’s Own with a half-finished cream slice in her hand. She was reading out a diet: ‘Discover the new slim you’. She said, ‘You’re lucky, you’ve got lovely legs.’ I felt luckier than luck itself.

  I looked at my legs as soon as she’d gone. I looked at the other girls’ legs. Were mine nicer? Were theirs nicer? Whose were the nicest legs? Ann said, ‘Valerie has the nicest legs of all of us.’ I prayed Valerie would have an accident with her nice legs.

  I said Ann had lovely hair. I used to set her hair: twenty-five curlers and twenty-five hairpins and twenty clips. Ann had a hairdryer so’s she could make her curly hair look sleek. Her mother would allow her things like that, but not sweets or cakes. Anything, darling, as long as it made her look sleeker.

  We used to spend hours trying to make our hair look sleek.

  I stole two eggs from the kitchen. The magazine said, ‘You should feed your hair just like you feed your stomach.’ They showed a picture of a girl cracking an egg over her head. We cracked eggs on our heads, on our hair. The magazine didn’t say what to do next. Mine went like scrambled eggs because I ran the hot tap on it and the water was nearly boiling and I burnt my scalp and had a big mess of sticky egg on it.

  We pierced our ears. One of the magazines said if you rubbed some pure alcohol on the lobe of the ear and then quickly jabbed with a very sharp, sterilized needle, having placed a clean cork behind the lobe to be pierced, it would not be painful.

  The only alcohol we could think of in the school was the altar wine that was to be turned into the blood of Jesus Christ during Mass, so we thought it must be ‘pure alcohol’. The altar boy brought us a cupful for five shillings. Ann crept into my cubicle after lights out. We had a torch. I’d laid out the needle, the cork and the altar wine and a piece of cotton wool on my bedside locker. It looked quite professional. I’d run the needle under the hot tap during evening break.

  I was to be done first. Ann said that would be the best. I held the torch in one hand and a little circular mirror that magnified your face in the other.

  Ann dipped the cotton wool in the wine. She rubbed it on my right ear lobe. I felt some of the wine dribbling down my neck, cold like a little worm. Ann pushed the cork behind my ear and fixed the ear lobe over it. Then she said, ‘Right?’ and jabbed with the needle. Ahh! I stiffened all over; I thought she’d driven the needle into my eardrum.

  ‘Shh’, she whispered, ‘shh,’ – slightly petulant. She was the occupied surgeon. Then jab, again. Then jab, jab, jab. My scalp was lifting off, the torch shaking, my eyes burning with tears.

  ‘There,’ said Ann finally, leaning back, turning the mirror. ‘Look!’ I looked and the needle was sticking right through and then into the cork; my ear was an impaled animal, helpless.

  ‘We’ll have to turn the needle round a few times,’ Ann hissed, ‘to make the hole bigger.’ She turned it. It was like the dentist tapping a tune on a raw tooth.

  She did the second one. Then we put in golden safety pins as we had no earrings. You had to do that to keep the holes open. I took three aspirin. I said to Ann she’d have to wait for hers till tomorrow. I lay on my back, my ears gripping together: one ear, one feeling of pain.

  The next day I kept my hair down over my ears and screamed out loud when I caught the comb in one of the pins when I was combing my hair. We got one of the day-girls to buy a pair of earrings for two shillings. We got Valerie to do Ann’s ears for her. I couldn’t do it.

  Then we tried to make our bosoms bigger. We saw an ad for this suction tube thing a woman was holding over one of them to make it bigger. You saw a picture of her: Before and After. After she had a big bosom, like two mountains. Ann said perhaps the suction plunger for clearing the sink would do the trick.

  I knelt over Ann, wielding the plunger. After a bit of fiddling about we finally got
it to grip the right breast. But then, panic. We couldn’t get it off. I was frantically pulling, Ann was screaming and her chest was pulled up like a chicken’s when it’s being plucked and Doreen, this girl from the North of Ireland, came in and said, ‘Ye pair of bloody eejits, have ye no sinse at all?’ She rubbed soap round the edge of the plunger and it slipped off. Ann was left with a big red mark round her breast for days—like a target board.

  We went on diets together. We set up rigorous schedules for face-cleansing, muscle-toning, hair-conditioning. They’d last less than a week. We went on fruit-eating binges. We went on programmes of squeezing every blackhead in sight and then went on programmes of diligently avoiding even touching them.

  We went on walks together. We marched down through the school woods, our coats buttoned against the March winds, chanting Hamlet at the top of our voices. We knew the whole of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by heart, and great chunks of Paradise Lost. We gabbled out precis of Irish poems that we’d carefully memorized from our Irish readers. We reeled off Dates of Importance in Irish History, carefully memorized from our history readers. We shouted Caesar’s wars to the wind.

  We played at being in love together. We pretended Ann was going on a long journey. She was my husband. She was going to Russia. As a spy. We were hugging each other. Kissing each other. Saying, ‘My dearest, my darling, I love you, I love you, I always, always will …’

  We pretended we were in a film. Ann was the shy, little, poor girl and I was a Man of the World. I was Gregory Peck. I’d take her for a walk, pointing out the trees and flowers. She’d be surprised, awestruck; such knowledge, such sophistication. She’d be humble, prostrate. I’d sweep her in my arms and hold her tightly. I’d protect her from the nasty, horrid world. I’d make her mine.

  We gave each other holy pictures for our missals: ‘To Dearest Liz, In Rem. of our becoming BFs, God Bless You, Ann.’ BFs meant Best Friends. Everyone had a BF. Everyone’s missal had holy pictures from different BFs at different times.