The One I Was (13 page)

‘Pass me that tape measure,’ Cathal said. As I handed it to him he seemed to misjudge the distance, closing his fingers in mid-air. The metal-cased tape measure dropped, hitting the side of Cathal’s mug on the grass. The mug wobbled and a little chip came out of the rim. Some of the tea spilled out.

‘For God’s sake,’ Cathal shouted.

‘It was just an accident,’ Andrew said.

Cathal was still staring at the spilled tea soaking the grass.

‘I’ll make you some more.’ I heard the apology in my own voice even though it hadn’t been me who’d dropped the tape measure.

‘Don’t you worry, Rosie.’ His voice regained its usual warmth. ‘We’ll finish this tomorrow. Your mother wants me to move furniture down from the top floor to the
basement.’ He walked away, leaving the tape measure and mug beside the half-sawn planks. Andrew and I sat for a moment without talking.

‘As I’ve said before, Cathal’s a bit weird.’ Andrew lined up a row of nails so that they all pointed towards the house.

I retrieved the tape measure and picked up the mug. It was an old one, so Smithy probably wouldn’t tell me off too much for chipping it. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He says these things. There was this old woman in front of us at the lights. Her car stalled on the green and we missed our turn. He said we should bump her, just gently, to make her pay attention.’ He shrugged.

We went inside and washed the mugs and put them away in the cupboard. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ Andrew mimicked Smithy as he closed the door.

‘Smithy really doesn’t like Cathal,’ I said.

‘It’s breaking my heart.’ It was Cathal, standing in the kitchen doorway, looking relaxed, amused almost. He vanished before we could think of an answer. I folded the drying-up cloth into precise squares and hung it on the stove lid, as though Smithy-like attention to detail might somehow make things right. I didn’t look at Andrew and knew that he wouldn’t want to catch my eye, either.

Something thumped overhead. A chest or table falling over, perhaps. I walked out into the hall. Silence from upstairs. Followed by a laugh. Then a door closing.

Mum and Cathal didn’t come down for over an hour. When they did, Mum’s face was bright. Andrew bent his head down to the comic he was reading. I found a loose thread in my cardigan and wound it round and round.

Smithy came back from her niece’s just as we were serving supper. She looked from Mum to Cathal, a slow, steady gaze that caused Mum to blush over the steaming dish of macaroni cheese.

‘You know, Marcy would have me to live with her,’ Smithy said. ‘There’s a spare room. I could help with the cooking and the little one.’

Colour fled Mum’s face. ‘You couldn’t leave us, Smithy. We need you.’

Smithy leaving Fairfleet would be like removing November or February from the calendar: unthinkable, even though those months were chilly and gloomy.

*

‘I call him Cattle,’ Andrew said when we talked about the day’s events later on, sitting on my bed and whispering. ‘Because he’s stupid like cows.’

I didn’t think he was stupid at all. I’d seen him with Mum, standing patiently with her while she ummed over the relocation of a piece of furniture. Helping her re-hang paintings. He was good at that: able to see how moving a frame an inch this way or that changed the look of a wall. He’d suggested relocating a red Persian rug from the dining room into the drawing room and had transformed a dull room into one you wanted to spend all day in.

Smithy had observed the relocation of objects through half-closed eyes. ‘I suppose nobody minds that the dining-room carpet has holes in it and we can see them now the rug’s gone?’

Next morning Cathal was quiet as he ate. When we were clearing the plates he spoke. ‘I’ve said it before, but we should teach the children ourselves, Clarissa.’

‘Isn’t that against the law?’ Andrew asked.

‘The law says you have to be educated, but it doesn’t specify that it has to be done in a school,’ Cathal answered.

‘So
you’d
teach Andrew and Rose?’ Smithy had been listening intently to the conversation as she washed up.

‘I would.’

‘Miss Smith is doubting I’m up to the task, aren’t you?’ He was watching her with his amused expression.

‘Of course you’re up to the task.’ Mum sounded almost brusque. ‘But why would you want to do it, Cathal? There are enough good schools in the county. We just need to get on with looking for one.’

‘What do they really teach them, though? They’re examination factories. They knock the curiosity out of children. Look at me, full of intellectual beans as a child.’

‘Which school did you go to?’ Smithy asked.

‘It was in Ireland. You wouldn’t have heard of it. But I have taught in this country.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ll write you down a list if you want.’ He sounded jovial. ‘The point is, these two could do better. Fairfleet is full of books.’

‘You’re certainly the best-educated person I’ve ever met,’ Mum said. ‘But it’s a big undertaking, Cathal.’

‘It buys us time. By next academic year they’ll be really up to speed, ready to thrive in a truly excellent school. Probably ahead of their peers.’

‘Ahead,’ Mum murmured. ‘Yes, I suppose they would be.’

I noticed that he had moved position very quickly and smoothly, from claiming that schools were examination factories to stating that some of them were excellent.

‘I’ll drive you into Oxford and we can buy the books you need,’ Mum said. ‘We shouldn’t let any more time pass.’

‘You children can spend the morning clearing out the old classroom so we can use it,’ Cathal said.

Smithy stared at him.

‘What old classroom?’ Andrew asked.

‘The room beside the stairs.’ Mum was hunting for the car keys. ‘That’s where the Jewish boys had their lessons during the war. But Cathal thinks it’s a shame not to –’

‘Where Smithy keeps her things?’ Andrew interrupted. Smithy stored mops, dusters and the ancient vacuum cleaner in the room, along with some of her own possessions. Sometimes she made herself a cup of tea and sat down in an old armchair with a copy of the
Mail
. I had never thought of it as a proper room. But it had windows, I remembered.

‘I’ll move my things.’ Smithy spoke in a tight voice, as though reminding us that she knew she was only a servant, paid to live here, not part of the family. But she was more than that, surely?

‘We’ll help.’ Andrew pushed aside his plate and stood up.

‘I wanted to go to the comprehensive,’ I told Andrew as we moved buckets and mops out of the room.

‘Perhaps he’ll get bored with the whole teaching thing.’ He stretched up to remove a cardboard box of laundry soap from a shelf. ‘Where shall we put this?’

‘Down in the basement.’ Smithy held out a hand. ‘I’ll take it down.’ We heard her trudge towards the steps.

I remembered something. ‘There’s an old blackboard down there. We could bring it up.’ A small thump of excitement hit me. It felt disloyal to Smithy to feel excited about Cathal teaching us.

‘What’s that?’ Andrew nodded at a dusty flat object lying on its side on the shelf where the soap had been.

I stood on tiptoe to pull it down. ‘A photo.’

A rare colour photo from the war. Granny in flying jacket and trousers, smiling, at the centre of a group of young men, recognizable despite the mannish clothes and forties
hairstyle. They looked fondly back at her. One of the younger ones, hardly more than a boy, stood out from the others because of his fine features and height. And the expression he wore on his face as he smiled back at Granny.

‘He really liked her, didn’t he?’ I pointed at the boy.

Andrew sneezed. ‘God, that’s dusty. Yes, he fancied her all right. Let’s get that blackboard up. And there might be some old desks down in the basement, too. Granny never seemed to throw anything away.’

I wiped the photograph on my jeans and replaced it on the shelf. It seemed a shame for such a happy picture to be stuck down here where nobody could look at it.

Smithy came back in. She looked hollow, as though the clearing out of this room was somehow sucking the spirit out of her.

‘I’m sorry about your things, Smithy,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they’ll send us to school soon and you can move back in.’

‘I expect I’ll manage.’ Smithy looked around the room with something approaching a smile, a very cool smile, like sunshine on a frosty morning.

*

Cathal was silent when he appeared at lunchtime following the shopping trip. He sat with a sheet of paper and pen, writing out days of the week and subjects to be studied.

‘I wonder if he ever goes home,’ I said to Andrew when we went outside after the meal. ‘He seems to spend all his time here now.’

‘What do you mean, go home?’

I didn’t understand.

‘He lives here now. Haven’t you got that yet?’

‘But where …?’

‘Where does he sleep?’ He laughed, not in a particularly cheerful way. ‘Where do you think, Rose?’

Not in Granny’s room; I’d seen the quilt still pulled tight and creaseless over the bed, untouched since we had cleared out the room. And not on the top floor, in the rooms next to Smithy’s, because those beds had been stripped.

He slept in Mum’s bedroom
. I couldn’t let myself say it.

Andrew kicked the side of the stone steps leading to the front door. ‘Yup. God, it makes me sick, just thinking about it. And now he’s going to teach us too. He’s just squirming his way into our lives, Rose, like a worm.’

Mum cooked dinner that night, roast lamb and potatoes. She brought up a bottle of Granny’s wine from the cellar. Cathal put his hand over his glass.

‘Need to keep my brain sharp to deal with these youngsters in the morning.’ His eyes glittered.

‘It’s very good claret.’ Mum poured herself a little. She didn’t drink much alcohol these days, said it didn’t go well with the Lithium.

With an intense look of concentration Cathal watched the dark red liquid flow into her glass.

*

In the morning when we went down to lessons a Cathal greeted us whom we hadn’t encountered before. He wore a shirt I hadn’t seen and what looked like new cord trousers, neatly pressed. On each of the desks sat a maths textbook, exercise book, pencil, compass and protractor.

‘I’ll be setting Andrew more advanced work as he’s older. But I’ll stretch you, too, Rosie. You’ve a sharp brain on you.’ His eyes still twinkled, but there was sharpness in them this morning. Cathal the teacher might not be as easy-going as Cathal the gardener and general handyman.

‘You’re both starting with geometry. Let’s just run through what you know.’

Triangles, acute angles, rectangles, pi, circles. He asked questions and probed. Drew shapes on the blackboard. Asked us questions about football pitches and circus rings. He had a way of making me believe I knew the answer, that it was buried somewhere inside me and I only needed to extract it, that I was far better at maths than I could have dreamed and it was only the stupidity of earlier teachers that had prevented me from discovering this fact.

Andrew learned how to do all kinds of fancy things with triangles, using a small book of mysterious numbers called logarithms. The three of us measured and multiplied for an hour and a half.

‘Enough now.’ Cathal looked at his watch. ‘Sit back, close your eyes and just listen.’

He started to read us a poem about someone arising and going now to build a cabin. The words didn’t seem very clever, but there was something about the rise and fall of Cathal’s voice that made me want to listen to the next word and the next.

‘W.B. Yeats,’ he said, when he’d finished. ‘We will be looking at more of his poems. Some people say they’re too advanced for children, but Rosie would disagree, wouldn’t you, Rosie?’

I nodded, pleased he’d noticed my appreciation of the poetry.

‘Off you go then. Go and run around outside for ten minutes. We’ll do some geography then before lunch. That’ll be enough for today.’

We sat out by the lake eating the Garibaldis Smithy had left out for us. ‘Well,’ I said.

Andrew grunted. I knew what he was feeling. It was hard to admit it, but Cathal was good.

*

‘We’ll study French this morning,’ Cathal said, next day at breakfast. ‘There’s more to learning a language than memorizing nouns. French is the language of philosophy.’

‘Most children need to be able to ask for a glass of water or directions,’ Smithy objected.

‘I’m not teaching these two to be just like any other children,’ he said mildly.

‘They still need to start with the basics. That’s what Dr Dawes did with the Jewish boys. He taught them to ask for simple things in English: an apple, what the time was, where the railway station was. And he made them learn the rules.’

‘Oh rules, rules,’ Cathal answered carelessly.

‘Rules are there for a reason.’

It looked as though Smithy and Cathal were about to lock themselves into one of the arguments that regularly flared up between them. I slipped out of the kitchen. Still an hour until we started lessons. I went up to my mother’s room.

Mum was getting dressed. Today she was going to wear a very simple navy wool dress. She was looking much smarter in the last few weeks; Cathal encouraged her to put aside the old trousers she’d preferred before. Dad had never seemed to notice what Mum was wearing, but I’d heard Cathal suggesting she might swap one shirt for another, this cardigan for that jacket, add this belt or that scarf.

I looked for signs of Cathal in the room. He didn’t appear to have many possessions at all, but I spotted a comb I didn’t recognize on the bedside table on the other side of Mum’s
bed. And a pair of his shoes under the dressing table. Perhaps he was keeping the rest of his things in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

‘Can I look at your wedding dress?’

Mum took it out of the wardrobe for me, laying it on top of the unmade bed. It felt strange to think of Cathal sleeping here too. I wished the covers had been pulled up over the bottom sheet so that I didn’t have to think of his long body asleep on it beside my mother’s. I touched the buttons on the dress sleeves through the plastic film. But this morning the dress didn’t seem to be exerting its influence.