Fathers Come First Read online

  One night I wrote Ann a poem. It was about mountains and rivers and rushing waters and her eyes and her hair. It was about her ‘silken tresses balanced atop those luminous orbs of wisdom, thine eyes.’ It was beautiful, I thought. My heart. Ann’s desire.

  Valerie found the poem. She read it out to three girls. I could hear them from my cubicle. They were laughing like hyenas. Ha, ha, ha.

  I ran out of my cubicle and down the dormitory and one of them saw me and said, ‘Oh Jesus, there’s Elizabeth, she must have heard us.’ I ran on and down to the hockey field and cried till my eyes felt like holes in the wind and my head was the size of the sky.

  Ann laughing with Valerie at the poem. My love. I could hear their laughs creaking.

  I took the holy pictures and the letters Ann had written to me. I took a rag doll she’d given me for putting my nightdress in, and a handkerchief with ‘L’ embroidered crookedly in the corner. I put them all in a cardboard box with ‘Heinz meanz Beanz’ printed on each side. I left them outside her cubicle door with a note saying, ‘I never want to talk to you again, Elizabeth.’

  I went back into my own cubicle. I got into bed and pulled the sheets over my head. The lights went out. I was lying on my back. I ran my hands up and down my body, under my nightdress.

  I felt my nipples, stiffening and standing. I ran my tongue over my lips. I was thinking: one day I’ll have a man and he’ll be doing this to me; my man will be doing this to me every night and my body will be all white and fiery and he’ll be stroking and petting; I never thought of what I’d be doing to him. But I could feel what my own body would be like, so running, so smooth.

  I thought: Ann. Ann and her friends. Her BFs. They can all go to hell for all I care. Soon I’ll have a man and I’ll be with him and he’ll be protecting me from their eyes and their laughs.

  I didn’t know then about the grappling, the bargaining, the closed eyes, the thrusting, the after-sleep, the mouth open and the snores, your own eyes black in the night’s blackness, drowning.

  —9—

  ‘Women,’ said the man from the Department of Education, ‘form a vital part of the Civil Service. They hold down jobs in every rung and sector.’

  I had visions of hundreds of grey-bunned, twin-setted and pearled spinsters clinging desperately to a swaying ladder. The man from the Department of Education was not there to stimulate our imaginations, however; he had come as part of the Mistress of Studies’ Career Guidance Programme.

  The Mistress of Studies had gone to one of the English convents for her Easter holidays. (Because the nuns weren’t allowed outside the convents, in the sense of staying with relatives, or visiting hotels, they had to holiday in other convents. ‘Jaysus,’ we’d say, ‘The Poor Things.’) But the Mistress of Studies had discovered that the English nuns had a fully fledged Career Guidance Programme going for their girls. (They even had some talks on Marriage and Family Planning. But that wasn’t to be for the Irish girls.) She came back from her holidays having had her very first swim in a swimming pool, and determined that St Margaret’s Boarding School for Young Ladies would have a Career Guidance Programme. Our year was the first year to benefit from such twentieth-century thinking.

  The man from the Department of Education made an inauspicious start. He wore a dark grey suit that was far too long in the crotch. He had horn-rimmed glasses that he kept pushing up his nose—a nervous tick. He was like someone who’d spent a long time in a dark room and only crept out occasionally.

  He intoned the salary scales and increments women could get in the Department of Education. His face almost warmed as he moved up the year-by-year increases. We, I seem to remember, remained unmoved.

  He had tea with the teachers in the school refectory and folded his thin-sliced bread back on itself and dipped it in his tea. We looked on, horrified, fascinated at his vulgarity. He took out a packet of Woodbines and lit one up—‘Hope you don’t mind, Sister?’ to the nun—and blew smoke everywhere. He went off then in his battered Fiat leaving six neat piles of leaflets about all the things women could do in the Irish Civil Service. The leaflets went yellow and dusty in the Assembly Hall bookstand.

  It was our last term at school.

  We had our Leaving Certificate examinations to take at the end, 10 June. We knew the sun would shine as it always did during exam times. We would feel very important. Surprised at how quickly we’d become the serious seniors we’d gawped at only such a short time ago. The juniors would be extra nice to us, offering to do all sorts of favours. The teachers would be solicitous: ‘How did you do? What was the Lit paper like? Which question did you answer first?’ and so on. The nuns would whisper, ‘I’m saying a special novena to St Joseph for you dear,’ and would let us sleep in on Sunday morning.

  We’d have our supper separately from the rest of the school in a room off the kitchen. The ‘leavers’ ate there every year. It was a privilege. It was supposed to help us relax before the following day’s ordeal. We scraped each other’s nerves and rattled each other’s confidence and barked, like gladiators. ‘God I can’t remember a thing … Ooh I wish I’d worked harder at Irish … Ah no, really, I’m sure you’ll do very well … really …’

  After the exams everything for me was a blank. I’d got over loving Ann Gilligan. I could even talk to her without blushing. I’d become Valerie’s friend. We went round together being very brittle and cutting.

  I thought I might be a very brainy Hayley Mills. I’d pretend I was in a film and flick my hair walking down the corridor and ridge my forehead to show I wasn’t just a Pretty Face. Valerie said we should go to Dublin when we left and get a flat and invite fellas in for drinks and things. We said that was the thing.

  I got a letter from Jack Hickey. I thought it was a slightly stupid letter, awkward. I didn’t say that to anyone. Valerie said, ‘He sounds gorgeous. Protestants are terrible rude you know’ and gave me an elbow in the ribs and we laughed and all I could see was Jack Hickey in his cricket whites.

  I didn’t write back immediately. Valerie said, ‘You mustn’t make a fool of yourself, throwing yourself at him. Keep him guessing.’ So, I thought: Let him wait, let’s see if he’s really in love, let’s see if he writes again.

  He didn’t write again. After six weeks I didn’t know what the next step was so I didn’t write either. I was the one guessing.

  Then we had our career guidance talks.

  The Mistress of Studies had fixed Saturday afternoons as the most appropriate time for us to peruse our future careers. The Saturday afternoon following the visit from the man from the Department of Education, a man came who’d been cured at Lourdes. Nobody seemed quite sure what kind of career he might advise us to adopt (other than a general increase in holiness, etc.), but the Mistress of Studies had been given his name by one of the nuns in Dublin when she’d written asking for speakers for her Career Guidance Programme. So he was invited.

  The man was rather fat and red-faced. He’d been dying of TB, tuberculosis. He stood on the podium, refusing the comfort of a chair; he was that holy. He occasionally sipped from a carafe of water that the nuns had provided. The carafe of water had been taken from one of the parlours and it was placed on a square table that had a crimson plush tablecloth down to the ground. The table had a matching chair that also stood on the wooden podium.

  The man described how the doctors had given up all hope, and how he had only a few months to live and how his sister, who was a most holy woman (a spinster, who’d given up her life to look after her ageing parents and now her dying brother), had secretly saved up for a ticket to Lourdes for the two of them. How she arranged it all and then told him.

  He told us how he woke up from his drugged state on the aeroplane and he thought he was winging his way to heaven and that the Aer Lingus air hostess was an angel. The nun was smiling, and nodding, and smoothing her habit down with her hands.

  The man said,
‘When you are first wheeled out into the main square at Lourdes you feel quite self-conscious but soon you relax as there are hundreds of other people in wheelchairs, on stretchers, on crutches.

  ‘Then,’ he said, ‘my turn came to go into the baths.’ I’d thought that the sick people were wheeled under a mountain spring, where Bernadette the little peasant girl had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary, and fresh mountain water ran over you and your wounds and then you jumped up and threw away your crutches shouting ‘Hallelujah’ and your crutches wobbled on top of a huge pile of other crutches and wheelchairs and stretchers that people had discarded after a touch of the miracle water.

  But no. The man said the baths were quite old, scabrous sort of baths. You didn’t even get clean water, you were just slipped in after hundreds of other pilgrims with all their diseases. He said, ‘That’s a miracle in itself, the way nobody gets a disease from that water.’ (You thought: That’ll be something to tell the Hickeys, next time they laugh about Lourdes.)

  He said, ‘The water was freezing. I thought my last hour had come, that my poor diseased, battered body would never stand the shock of the cold, old, water. I clung to my sister’s hand.’

  Two weeks later the doctors in the Lourdes hospital confirmed that he was cured. There was no sign of TB on his X-ray. He said he still didn’t have a certificate because it took a whole team of brilliant doctors months and months of investigation before they proclaimed a Miracle. It was very difficult to get them to agree that a Real Miracle had taken place. Very difficult. Lourdes wasn’t all holy water and leaping cripples. Oh no. A very serious, difficult business.

  I wished somebody I knew would get terribly sick so’s I could take them to Lourdes.

  After the man with TB, we had a visit from an ‘Old Girl’. Old Girls were past pupils of the school. There was a special section about them in the School Annual, the Old Girls’ section: who was having a baby, and who’d got married, and who’d won an award for this or that. Mostly about babies and marriages though.

  This Old Girl was called Oonagh. She’d been working for the United Nations for three years.

  She said she got paid ninety dollars a week and we all gasped. She was a secretary to some big shot in the U.N. Secretariat. She told us about having to go out to dinner a lot with visiting dignitaries to New York’s poshest restaurants.

  She said, ‘The United Nations is the most important institution in the history of mankind for keeping the peace. Without it there would be another World War. Nobody wants another World War do they?’ she shouted rhetorically from the platform, her dyed New York blonde hair stiff round her pinky-white face.

  We said, ‘Oh no,’ in great and solemn unison. But really I think we would have quite liked one. Grown-ups were always saying, ‘Oh that was before the War,’ or, ‘Well that was during the War, wasn’t it?’ Or the really old ones would say, ‘Now which war do you mean?’ They’d turn to you, very patronizing, and say, ‘But of course you wouldn’t remember that.’ They were very proud of their damned wars as far as we could see.

  Anyway it was just around the time of the trouble in the Congo and this Oonagh girl told us that the United Nations was keeping the peace there. We knew some Irish soldiers had gone out and we were told that a few of them had been eaten. We all called each other ‘Big Ballubas’ that term, as an insult. We didn’t argue with the girl about the peace because we only got the papers once a week and nobody in school ever discussed politics.

  So we listened to Oonagh very respectfully, and felt sorry for her. You could tell she was going to be a spinster with her soft mohair top and expensive silk scarf. We weren’t fooled by all the talk of dinners, and ninety dollars a week, and wars.

  Then we had a woman and a man from a theatre troupe. We liked them. The nuns got very agitated. The Mistress of Studies had thought they were opera singers from the Gaiety Theatre but they just sang sparkly songs from the twenties and said, ‘Darlings, life in the theatre is hell, but it gets into your blood —like a drug.’

  The woman had masses of powder on, and very red lipstick. Her hair was dyed black and she smoked king-size cigarettes in this long black holder non-stop. She was called Maureen and the man was called Brendan. Maureen did most of the talking and Brendan smiled at her and burst out laughing and pointed his finger at her and covered his mouth with his hands and his two eyebrows went up in a point into his forehead.

  Maureen told us she peed on the stage her first night in her first public pantomime; she was a fairy. She said she nearly died of shame. She wore masses of rings. She did a quick rendition of Lady Macbeth trying to rub the blood off her hands after she’d murdered the king, because we were doing Macbeth for our exams. The rings clicked as she rubbed her hands: ‘What, what, will these little hands ne’er come clean …’ She looked tormented. Then she recited Padraic Pearse’s poem: ‘I do not grudge them, Lord I do not grudge …’ Pearse had written the poem for his mother the night before the British executed him. The nuns thought that was beautifully done.

  Then we had a woman who ran a secretarial college in Dublin. It was called Miss Lavelle’s Finishing School. The name was painted up in gold lettering over the door. (Inside, though, there was nothing but desks that had grime and sweat from hundreds of elbows and hands and fingers and old grey typewriters that had to be crashed at to get up any speed or make a carbon copy. That you learnt about much—years—later.)

  Miss Lavelle said, ‘Every young lady now needs to have some skill she can fall back on if times get hard.’ Times getting hard meant being widowed—suddenly, tragically, poetically. Left with three young children to feed and clothe.

  Miss Lavelle said her girls did very well for themselves. She said they had good jobs in the Civil Service and one of them was a personal secretary to a bank manager. One had even started up a little business of her own.

  Besides typing and shorthand, Miss Lavelle said she also taught elocution, English Literature, simple mathematics and deportment. She said she was sure that Young Ladies like ourselves, with the lovely education the holy nuns had given us and all, wouldn’t need such things.

  We sat through each visit, sometimes amused, sometimes amazed, sometimes plain bored. We never felt involved. These were visitors from another world. We thought: Soon we’re going to leave school. We’ll be free, free to do anything. Free to stay in bed all day. Free to drink coffee till four in the morning. Free to wear what we like.

  We thought: We have no intention of signing up with some lower-class little secretarial school. No, not on your life. Jobs—ha! We were going to be free for a bit and then we were going to be married. (Apart from Geraldine Doyle who was potty anyway.) We were all going to have smart husbands who would have smart jobs and lots of money. We were going to have tiny button-nosed children in perpetually clean dresses. This was our

  pre-destined destiny. Secretaries, United Nations, Big Shots—ha!

  Some girls would go to University. Perhaps three or four every year. This was because ours was a posh school and there was a tradition of a few professional career girls and blue stockings emerging annually. That was what the tradition was.

  But soon there would be the Last Day of Term. We would all cry and think we were terribly old and feel a bit frightened. We would give our cubicles to our friends in the year below us, and pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Russ Conway to the juniors. Our parents would come in their cars and pick us up. We would be strained and pale after our long two weeks of exams. We would hug each other and shake hands with the nuns and accept their kisses on our cheeks. The school would sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and we would cry and the other girls would cry and even some of the nuns would shed a tear into their big white handkerchiefs with numbers in the corners.

  Our parents would take us home. On the way many of us would stop for roast beef dinners in hotels. A celebration.

  Part Two

  —1—

 
‘France!’ said the woman on the bus coming in from the airport. ‘Merciful Jesus, I was there once meself. I’ve never known a people with worse smelling breath than that lot. And the food they’d give ya! It wouldn’t be worth feedin’ to the dogs. Me husband and I had to stay three days there in Paris once. I thought we’d never get out of it—ugh!’

  I smiled what I hoped was a supremely condescending smile. The woman didn’t even seem to notice. She just went on and on like that. Everything reduced to an irritation. You could hear her—Rome, Athens, Africa: Merciful Jesus! The sweat, the heat, the noise, the smell. Something. She began to irritate me. I hadn’t liked France that much either. But I’d never thought of saying so.

  We’d left school. Before Valerie could come to Dublin, the local doctor had cast an eye on her; she gave him encouragement and in horror and haste her mother sent her off to Italy. She taught English to the children of a Count, slept with Italian writers and Hungarian refugees. She also learnt how to de-hair her legs with beeswax.

  I sat at home. I got my exam results. They were neither brilliant nor disastrous.

  Whenever my father noticed I was around he would say, ‘We must get you into the history faculty, Liz,’ and then go back to his study. He was writing an exhaustive history of the time of the Fir Bolg in Ireland.

  I went into town and met school friends for coffee and we talked about boys and our bodies and clothes. I read books, intermittently and haphazardly. I made myself things to wear. Days passed by. Pleasantly or unpleasantly? I can’t really remember. Nobody had ever said things like, ‘Things only happen if you make them happen.’ So I suppose I was just waiting for something to happen to me.

  At school our plan had been to be free. Free of our parents, free of petty restrictions. We hadn’t thought: To be free you have to have money, to have money you had to have a job. The nuns hadn’t told us that. I could chant Caesar’s battles; I could recite the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ without pause. That was all.