Katie saw Molly hesitate on spotting her, and she didn’t call out to ask if she could walk with her. Molly shrank back until Katie had gone right past. Katie gave a smirk. She knew Molly was frightened of her, of her popularity and her sharp tongue. It made her feel powerful, making Molly cringe. She knew Em thought her rather unkind to Molly. Em was softer-hearted, even though she found Molly annoying as well.
Sitting in the classroom at the little double desk with its attached seat that she had used to share with Em, Katie sat in dread for the first few minutes of seeing Em come in through the door.
A couple of weeks ago, when Em had been absent a number of times, Miss Lineham had tutted and said, ‘Again! This is too much. Now – Lily Davies!’ Lily, as the new girl, had been put in the empty seat alongside Molly Fox. She had kept complaining to Katie about the smell. Molly always had a powerful reek of urine about her. ‘Lily – come and sit next to Katie O’Neill – quickly, please.’
Katie saw Molly controlling her face so as not to show how much she minded. She always seemed to end up on her own, but she really was dreadfully smelly – even the teachers noticed. And Miss Lineham wasn’t known for her kindness. Though quite young, she was harsh and spiteful.
Now Lily had taken over Em’s place, it was Em who had to sit next to Molly, if she ever turned up. Seeing her empty seat, Katie remembered with a sudden pang all their games with Ella and Princess Lucy. Em had a rag doll, Princess Lucy, with patched pink cheeks and yellow wool hair and her eyelashes stitched on. Katie’s doll, Ella, had a white china face with tinted cheeks and a rather flat cloth body. They had had hours of fun with them. Even Princess Lucy and Ella couldn’t be friends now! The thought brought tears to Katie’s eyes, which she quickly wiped away so that Lily didn’t see and ask what was wrong.
Miss Lineham called the register. Once again, Em was absent.
It was a great relief that Em wasn’t at school that particular day. Katie found Lily rather dull in comparison, but she was eager enough to be bossed around, which Katie found flattering, and she didn’t have to spend the day trying to keep out of Em’s way, or sit next to her and see how unhappy she was. Em had looked so pale lately and, when she did come to school, Miss Lineham had caned her for not paying attention. Em never got the cane as a rule and it had come as a terrible shock.
Katie didn’t really understand what was going on in the Browns’ house even now. First there was the baby – Em’s mom had given birth to the youngest in the family, Violet – then Em had gone all distant and subdued. She no longer looked clean and nice, like she used to. Then she more or less disappeared from school, and now there was this talk about Mrs Brown going to the asylum. Katie tried to shrug it all off. She was not to know or have anything to do with people like the Browns, Mother said. And she always had to do what Mother said.
Over the following weeks Katie lived in dread of running into Em. To her relief, Em was still staying off school a lot. But one evening, when Katie was playing jackstones out on the street with some other girls from school, Em came out of the house. Katie lowered her head immediately, pretending she hadn’t seen her.
‘Oi, Em! You coming out to play?’ one of them called. There was no reply at first, so the girl tried again. ‘Em?’
‘Can’t – I got to go somewhere.’
Katie kept her head down, hearing Em’s feet hurrying past. She hoped Em hadn’t seen her there in the group. She felt so ashamed, and so unsure what to think. Should she trust her mother’s version of things or her own – that Em was her friend? But it was too late now anyway.
But as winter set in, one day Em started coming back to school. One bright, crisp day Katie nearly ran into her going through the school gate. Her heart started thudding with panic. This was so horrible! If only Em would go away, just leave the school so that Katie didn’t have to face all this, and the way she had been so mean and nasty to Em! As their eyes met, Katie turned her lips up into a quick, darting smile. She didn’t dare do more, but she didn’t want to turn away without doing something that said:
I didn’t really mean it. I want to be your friend really, only I’m not allowed.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it all morning, and all the more so because Lily Davies was absent that day, leaving the space next to her empty. What if she made it up with Em? Would her mother ever know? But with a plunge of dread she knew that she would, somehow. Mother always found out everything. On the other hand, if they made it up for a bit, at least they could be friends again for a while and Em might not think so badly of her.
After playtime Miss Lineham ordered them all out into the playground for PT. She produced a pile of wooden hoops and the children stood squinting in the bright sunlight, rubbing their hands together in the cold.
‘Right, children,’ Miss Lineham commanded, ‘Line up in twos, please!’
Katie’s heart started to beat very hard again. Dare she ask Em to be her partner? In the old days they would always have shared a hoop, no question. For a few seconds she dared to hurry towards Em, and thought she saw Em watching her hopefully and start moving towards her as well. But then Molly Fox was at Em’s side. Molly Fox of all people! The thought of the Fox family made Katie’s flesh creep. Katie was stung by the rejection. A sneer spread over her face. Well, if that was what Em wanted, Katie didn’t want to be her partner, or her friend. She could keep rough, stinking Molly Fox, so there!
‘Will you be my partner?’ she asked a mousy girl called Gladys Day, who agreed eagerly, flattered to be asked.
At the end of the lesson, though, when they’d gathered up the hoops and were heading inside, Katie noticed that Em was near her in the line and she hung back so as not to get close to her. But to her discomfort, Em turned round, her cheeks blushing pink and said, ‘Hello, Katie.’ Her voice trembled a bit. ‘Can you come and play out later? I haven’t seen you for a long time.’
Katie looked down at her feet in their neat black pumps. She felt raw from what seemed like Em’s rejection earlier. Fancy choosing Molly Fox as a partner over her! And Mother said . . . Against her better nature, she looked up at Em contemptuously.
‘I told you, didn’t I? How many more times?’ She repeated all the reasons in a superior voice. She wasn’t to have anything to do with someone whose mother was in the asylum, let alone anyone who played with Molly Fox. ‘My mother says I should keep away from both of you. We thought you were from a nice family – but you’re not.’
She turned, looking away so as not to see Em’s face again this time, and ran after the others. She could see the last of the children in the playground eavesdropping on what had happened. Some of them were making faces at each other. Nosy parkers! But as Katie was going in through the school door, she glanced back. Em was standing in the playground where she had left her, all alone, as if she was rooted to the spot.
All Katie knew was that her mother had married for love, a man who was an Irishman and a Catholic, and because of this Vera O’Neill’s parents had cut her off like a diseased limb.
The one photograph of their wedding day – he dark, handsome, much taller than his stately bride with her old-fashioned hair and adoring smile – rested in its frame on the front mantelpiece.
When Katie thought about her father, she remembered a pair of well-polished black boots close to the brass fender by the fire, her sitting beside them, running a finger over the shiny surface and his voice, ‘Can you see your face in there then, Katie-Kitten?’
She could recall the sound of him more than a face – a gentle, lilting voice. There was an overall shape, the memory of black hair, hands with black hairs on the fingers and neat half-moons in the nails, of being held in strong arms, a smell of tobacco, that voice which held a smile in it.
No certain memory of his illness had stayed in her mind at all. Her mother said he had been ailing for months, starting with the coughing, then worse, and heartbreaking to watch. Katie had been so young they had kept it all from her somehow. But she did remember being taken up to see him in bed once or twice.
‘Why did Daddy pass away?’ she asked, several times over the years, trying to make sense of it all.
‘I told you, he was very poorly,’ Vera O’Neill would say, putting on a soft, sing-song voice when she spoke of this, almost as if it were a tragic fairytale. ‘He had a sickness in his lungs called tuberculosis. I nursed him for as long as I could. He suffered so much, my poor darling Michael, and he went into the hospital at the end. I felt I’d failed him, but it had to be. That’s why you don’t remember.’
Uncle Patrick had come home from Africa within months of his brother’s death, but Katie didn’t remember this either. It felt as if Patrick had always been there. Yet she had never once confused him with her father, despite the fact that what she recalled was often muddled and disjointed. There was another memory of being carried, this time by her mother who was wearing a green coat; Katie remembered curling her left index finger through one of the buttonholes, which had darker green stitching round it. They were outside a black, shiny door with a narrow window halfway up, below which was a brass knocker. Then the door was open: in a dark hallway a large man with a neat moustache, who stood up very straight. A woman, much smaller, was trying to see round him, just her head and shoulders showing and sandy brown hair. She knew now that these people had been her grandparents, but she had never seen them again after that day. Things were said, no voices raised, but a poisonous tone, eyes narrowed, frowns, then the door slammed in their faces. And on the way back her mother kept talking in sharp bursts, but not to her. There were enormous emotions somewhere. That was what her mother was like. Just under the surface, something swelling, frightening, that Katie could never understand.
Very rarely, her mother’s emotions did burst out, like on those mornings with Uncle Patrick when Katie was small.
Patrick was her father’s elder brother by eight years, but looked a good deal older. He was thin to the point of emaciation, slightly stooped, with sunken cheeks and stone-grey eyes. But his voice reminded Katie of her father, and his eyes were like her own, a blue that seemed to contain a vision of the sea. He was very variable: sometimes full of endless, wiry energy, full of songs and tales; at others, silenced, almost unable to move.
‘Your uncle has been in Africa,’ her mother told her. ‘The climate takes it out of people. It doesn’t suit everyone. He and your father were Cork men – that’s a very different sort of place, by the sea and full of mists and cool greenness.’
Her mother seemed to be in love with the idea of Ireland as much as she had been with the husband who had come from there. It was all part of the fairytale.
Katie was used to Patrick as someone kind and gently spoken, except when he was in his excited moods, when he became loud and talked so fast that the words tripped over one another and he began to seem alarming. To her, he was never anything but kind. Information came to her as torn rags, never a full cloth. Uncle Patrick had come back from a country called Uganda, where he had been with a Catholic missionary order of the White Fathers. When he told Katie this, she imagined everything about them ghostly white: skin, hair, long white robes. Maybe that’s why her uncle’s hair was almost white, unlike her father’s raven-black. They might not have let him join otherwise.
‘I was never a Father,’ he told her in his lilting voice. ‘I was just one of the humble Lay Brothers, doing a bit of teaching and other jobs they found me. I was never anyone of importance, don’t go thinking that.’
She did not know why he had come home to his brother’s widow; perhaps because he had nowhere else to go and knew that she was alone and needed support. There was nothing for him in Ireland now, and he seemed to feel a duty to look after Vera.
‘It’s a terrible thing, your father going like that,’ he would say to her sometimes, shaking his head sadly. ‘God knows, a man in his prime like that, with a family.’ The implication was always that it should have been he who died instead.
Though in Uganda he had at some time been teaching young children, he never looked for the same work in England. He could not have managed it. But he did work – at any job he could find. He looked after Vera, in his way, and she him. Katie had also come to take for granted the mysterious mixture of rage, shame, regard and tenderness with which her mother seemed to regard him.
But she remembered those mornings, once or twice, when she was still quite small, waking to hear her mother weeping hysterically next door, in the tiny bedroom that was Patrick’s. They were living off Thimble Mill Lane by now, not in the first house they had when Daddy was alive, which was bigger and in a better area because Daddy was an engineer, who’d been through all his apprenticeship. They had come down in the world. Her mother had been left in poverty, that was all she knew, like Enid Thomas, their neighbour, who had lost both her husband and son in the Great War.
‘Please,’ Vera was shrieking desperately, ‘Get up, for pity’s sake.’
Katie crept to the door, her thumb in her mouth. Patrick slept on a mattress on the floorboards in the barest of rooms, insisting that he didn’t need more. He was used to Africa, to having very little, and seemed to feel he deserved even less. He was lying curled tight on his side, and Vera had hold of his arm. She was down on one knee in a posture utterly unlike her usual reserved dignity, tugging frantically at him.